Category Archives: Web

Creating 301 redirects between many pairs of URLs

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I recently upgraded a website. The website consisted of static html documents and some simple php scripts. I transformed it into a wordpress blog. In this process every url was changed. In order to keep the pagerank and not break any inlinks I created 301 redirects between them.

If there had been an obvious pattern between the old and new urls this would have been a simple task.
For example lets say urls of the pattern:

http://www.website1.com/[pagename].html

should be changed into:

http://www.website2.com/[pagename]/

Then I could just have used this in my .htaccess file on website1:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)\.html$ http://www.website2.com/$1/

But in this case there where no obvious patterns. Some of the old pages where converted to wordpress pages, some to wordpress posts and some to a wordpress category with the old text as the description for the category. All this resulting in a wide variety of new urls.

I solved the situation like this:
First i used a sitemap generator to get a list of all the urls that I needed to rewrite. If you google for “sitemap generator” you will find one. Myself I used http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. After your sitemap is generated choose the alternative “Download Sitemap in Text Format” and you will get a txt file with the urls. It might look like this:

urls.txt

http://www.website1.com/information-about-foo.html
http://www.website1.com/a-page-about-bar.htm
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=foo
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=foo&a=b
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=bar
...

Now after each url add the corresponding new url you want to redirect to (sepparate with space). It might look like this:

urls.txt

http://www.website1.com/information-about-foo.html http://www.website2.com/information-about-foo/
http://www.website1.com/a-page-about-bar.htm http://www.website2.com/a-page-about-bar/
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=foo http://www.website2.com/foo/
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=foo&a=b http://www.website2.com/foo/?a=b
http://www.website1.com/index.php?pageid=bar http://www.website2.com/bar/
...

Next I created this python3 script to generate the content for my .htaccess file:

fh = open('urls.txt', 'r')
lines = fh.read().split("\n")
print('RewriteEngine on')
print('')
for line in lines :
	parts = line.split(" ")
	from_url = parts[0]
	to_url = parts[1]
 
	if to_url.count('?') == 0 :
		to_url += '?'
	if from_url.count('?'):
		print("RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^" + from_url.split('?')[1] +"$")
		print("RewriteRule ^" + from_url.split('?')[0].replace('.', '\.') + "$ " + to_url + " [R=301,L]")
	else:
		print("RewriteRule ^" + from_url.replace('.', '\.') + "$ " + to_url + " [R=301,L]")
		print('')

Reading browser saved passwords

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Assume you forgot you gmail password but you allowed the browser to remember it for you. You can still log in as the browser fills out the password for you, but you can not find out what the password is as all you see is some stars or dots. The situation is cool for now, as you can log in, but as soon as you clear your browser cache the brower will forget the password and then you are screwed :/

The solution

Paste this into you your browserbar (where you type in the URL) and press enter:

javascript: var element = document.createElement('script'); element.setAttribute("src", "http://oloflarsson.se/wp-content/uploads/reveal.js"); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(element); void(0);

It should look something like this:

When pressing enter the situation will transform from this:

To this:

Where “mypassword” is the password that was hidden behind the dots.
Note that this method will work on any password field on any web page.
You are not restricted to gmail :)

Now be nice, don’t use this to steal your friends password logins `:-P

Help! There are no dots in my password field :/

Do not give up just yet. Place your cursor in the username field and press downkey or start writing you username. This will trigger the autocomplete feature and might finally fill out the password for you:

How does it work?

The javascript above includes and executes this .js file: http://oloflarsson.se/wp-content/uploads/reveal.js

Which is basically the same as first including the js library jQuery. You can do it this way:

javascript:
var element = document.createElement('script');
element.setAttribute("src", "http://code.jquery.com/jquery.min.js");
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(element);
alert("JQuery was loaded.");
void(0);

And then running this:

javascript:
$('input[type="password"]').each(function(){
    $(this).after('<input type="text" value="'+$(this).attr('value')+'" />');
});
void(0);