date: 2018-01-20
tags:
- programming
- html
- javascript
title: Reliably Redirecting With HTML
---
When redesigning my website and re-writing my static site generator
[Posty](https://github.com/nickpegg/posty), I wanted to refactor the URLs
for my blog posts but not leave anyone hanging when they had an old URL
bookmarked. Since my website could be hosted somewhere that I don't have
control over the webserver config, I had to figure out how to do this with
HTML.
---
My goals were:
* Surprise users as little as possible
* Don't tank my site's SEO
* Reliably handle as many weirdo browsers as possible
After some research, it seemed like a Javascript redirect was the safest since
[at least GoogleBot passes PageRank to the destination page](https://www.branded3.com/blog/seo-javascript-redirects-evidence-pass-pagerank/).
So here's what I came up with:
{% raw %}
```
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