Don Fitz wrote:
> =

> A question from a rookie to the hard core. I am using name based
> hosting with Apache and I want to test my sites before I run them live.=

> I have heard that adding the domain to the hosts file temporarily will
> allow me to fool my server into thinking that it is looking at the
> actual domain because it checks the hosts file before dns. Is this
> true? Is there a better way to do this?
> =

> Don Fitzsimmons
> Lacky/Grunt
> Tornado Design
> Cell: 623-696-1298
> www.tornadodesign.com
> =

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I have my config file set as close as possible to my webhost.  I also
have my own DNS running on my network, which answers only to my LAN and
the firewall will not forward DNS traffic into the LAN.  That being
said, I have a dummy domain set up called georgetoft.test, and I test
all my pages on my test server, and when I'm satisfied, I upload to
georgetoft.com.

The caveat here is all links to georgetoft.com (and georgetoft.test)
must be relative, which I have found is much better than hardcoding the
domain name (ie, georgetoft.com) into the URI.  Relative links means I
can take my site (or pieces of it) and move it to another domain with no
effort (tar, ftp, untar, done).

I also have a linkchecker (based on lynx) that checks all internal links
(see http://www.georgetoft.com/linux/shell/linkcheck.shtml).  Using
these techniques has enabled me to create a site with over 600 pages
with no broken links internal to my own site.

Cheers,

George
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