The Storybridge Redirector

The Storybridge Dispatch redirector is a tool to help with migrating a set of web content from an existing domain or domains, hosted on conventional hosting over to Googles Apps for Domains.

Google Apps for your domain lets you have all you need if you're an organization or an individual or a crazy person who likes putting lots of stuff up on the web in all different ways - blogs, wikis, sites, apps and so on.

In my case I had the following:

• a wiki, which had content at URL's like
• http://storybridge.org/index.php/MrAndMrsSmith - my wedding photos :-)
  
• moving to http://sites.storybridge.org/personal/Home/MrAndMrsSmith
  
• http://storybridge.org/index.php/QtMing
• moving to http://sites/storybridge.org/compute/Home/qt-ming
  
• a blog, which had content under
• http://storybridge.org/wordpress
• moving to http://blog.storybridge.org
  
• various static images and files
  
• cvs web - under cvs.storybridge.org
• other stuff I had forgotten about
  

I wanted to add hosted applications, which I plan to write using googles AppEngine and also forums and whatever else.

So I wrote redirector, to allow me to create redirects which would send inbound requests from my old URL's to the new structure resulting from the move to the Goog.

What does it look like?

If you're browsing web-pages, in other words, if you are a client of the redirected pages, it doesn't look like anything - its completely invisible.  There is no "redirecting you..." message, its just bam, you're there.

As a browser you type in your location bar for example http://storybridge.org/wordpress and then press enter - behind the scenes the browser connects to the redirector which sends it a 302 redirect to http://blog.storybridge.org.  The blog page, now hosted on Google's blogger service appears, and the location bar shows http://blog.storybridge.org.  Nice as pie.

Notice that 302 is a permanent redirect - it is the WWW's way of saying, what you asked for has now moved house to over here, and you should update your records (that is your bookmarks).  This is really what you want if you're moving to Google Apps.

If you are managing - that is creating, updating, deleting - redirects via the StorybridgeDispatch web interface it looks like this:

How do I get it?

If you want to just use the existing redirector, the you will need to go to your Google Apps for your domain, and add the redirector as an AppEngine app to the base URL of your site, eg mydomain.com, not redirector.mydomain.com.

Then you change your DNS to point to AppEngine IP addresses as listed here: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=91080