RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

First party cookies are very useful. They are often used to remember your login credentials for sites your frequently visit. Third party cookies are for someone else’s benefit. Third party cookies are typically placed by advertisers associated with sites you visit.

Here is how you turn off third party cookies in these two browsers:

Firefox 3.5

1. Go to Tools —> Options —> Privacy tab
2. In the History panel change Firefox will: Remember history" to   Firefox will: Use custom settings for history
3. Check Accept cookies from sites
4. Uncheck Accept third-party cookies

   

5. Click the OK button.

Internet Explorer 8

1. Go to Tools —> Internet Options —> Privacy tab
2. Click the Advanced button
3. Check Override automatic cookie handling
4. Select Block" —>

   

5. Press the OK buttons as needed.

The facts:

• Yahoo! hosts the RHFtech web site.
• I needed to change a link on over 200 pages from my old blog to the URL http://blog.rhftech.com.
• The standard way to make a global change is to add a redirect command in the .htaccess file on the root directory of the web site. This is commonly known as a 301 redirect.
• Yahoo! does not allow access to this file.

I searched the web for solutions. The findings: many others have been down this road before me. They are an unhappy lot because they have not found a good solution.

The choices they write about are:

• Manually change the link on every page
• Switch to a different web hosting company.

Neither is an appealing choice. Both involve long, tedious effort with potential for issues and errors.

I called Yahoo!’s customer support and was greeted by a polite woman who told me what I already knew. I explained that since both my choices were bad I would probably switch providers rather than manually change all those pages. I said, “I need a quick solution and not an explanation of why I can’t edit the .htaccess file or I will switch hosts.”

She put her supervisor on the phone. He had a solution if I used Dreamweaver. The application has a command, Site > Change Link Sitewide…, that fit the bill.

I use Dreamweaver, “phew”.

The method:

1. Open a page in Dreamweaver.
2. Click on the page whose link will be redirected to a different URL in the Files panel (Local Files).
3. Click on the menu Site > Change Link Sitewide… and follow the prompts.

Once this is completed, you need to FTP all the changed pages to the host. I used FileZilla to do this. The process took 15 minutes from start to finish. It is not as elegant as putting a 301 redirect in .htaccess but it is much better than changing a web host.

Yahoo!’s support supervisor solved this problem. Thanks.