Live HTTP Headers Firefox Extension

As part of my url-redirection efforts related to the launch of the new company site, I've been looking more closely at 301 redirection using ColdFusion ( see this post about CF 301 with CFlocation - it really is that simple! )

But, being somewhat skeptical that it could really, truly be that simple, I still wanted to verify that the redirection was going through as '301' status in my web browser.

On the advice of a friend, I downloaded the quick easy FireFox extension called "Live HTTP Headers" http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/

Within a few seconds, I had my proof. I did a quick google search that I knew would turn up my old site, clicked "Tools > Live Http Headers" in Firefox, and clicked on the first result for 'www.mredesign.com'.

Sure enough I was looking at the new site, www.gowestweb.com , and in the little Live Http popup, I had my 301 proof.

Here's part of the detailed output:

http://www.mredesign.com/

GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.mredesign.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.google.com/search?q=utah+web+designer&btnG=Search&hl=en&client=firefox-a

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently Connection: close Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:44:48 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Location: http://www.gowestwebdesign.com/index.cfm Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 ---------------------------------------------------------- http://www.gowestwebdesign.com/index.cfm

GET /index.cfm HTTP/1.1 Host: www.gowestwebdesign.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.google.com/search?q=utah+web+designer&btnG=Search&hl=en&client=firefox-a

I am a happy (and safely redirected) camper. Very nice tool, works just like it should... and free!