Never Use This Font » apache

Tracking typos of your domain name in Google Analytics

aaron — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:41:53 +0000

Say you want to register a couple different typos of your domain name, and redirect everyone seamlessly to the correct site. This can be done quite easily in Apache using ServerAlias and a simple RewriteRule. I just registered geoloqui.com after noticing a couple articles linking to it instead of geoloqi.com. But then I thought, wouldn’t it be useful if I could track these typos and see which ones are most common? Turns out it’s not difficult!

Here is a snippet of my virtual hosts definition for geoloqi.com:


	ServerName geoloqi.com
	ServerAlias *.geoloqi.com
	ServerAlias geoloqui.com
	ServerAlias *.geoloqui.com

	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^geoloqi.com
	RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://geoloqi.com/$1?utm_source=DomainRedirect&utm_medium=%{HTTP_HOST} [R=permanent,L]
...

This will make domain typos visible in Google Analytics under the “All Traffic Sources” section. You can clearly see the referrals from the typo’d domain name at the bottom of this list.

You could also use the filter box to search for “DomainRedirect” and see only the typos.

I’d be curious to know if anybody else has other suggestions for tracking this type of thing.

Trouble restarting Apache

aaron — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:57:41 +0000

My VPS was restarted yesterday, and apparently Apache wasn’t shut down gracefully. I tried to go to my website, but Apache wasn’t running. I SSH’d into my machine to restart apache. I typed

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

I can’t remember exactly what it said back to me, but it gave me the PID of Apache (1039) and said it was running. Apache was most definitely not running. I found this out by getting a list of all running processes:

ps -ax

That gave me a list of PIDs corresponding to programs, and 1039 was not httpd. It occurred to me that if Apache thinks it’s running, it has to have some way of knowing that. In Apache’s log file directory, there is a file which holds the PID of Apache when it’s running. That file is called httpd.pid. By removing that file, Apache no longer thinks it’s already running, and will actually try to start. If you don’t know where httpd.pid is, run this command:

whereis httpd.pid

That should find it. If not, it is probably in /usr/local/apache2/logs if you installed with the default values. Then you just need to rm httpd.pid, and restart apache again. I got everything back up and running with just under 10 minutes of troubleshooting!