BorkWeb, like a number of other sites, will be going black this Wednesday as a protest to SOPA. Legends of the Sun Pig has an excellent article on this exact topic. Martin writes:
Google recommends using HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” status codes. The 503 code indicates that the service (or page, or site) is temporarily unavailable, but that it is expected back again soon. This is better than using the 404 (not found), 302 ( moved temporarily), or 301 (moved permanently) codes, because it tells web crawlers that they should just come back and try again later.
Because I have no desire to manually make the cut-over to a SOPA Blackout .htaccess file at midnight (because I’m lazy), I took his .htaccess settings and made a modification to enable the settings for the tomorrow. Here’s what I have:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# =====================
# SOPA Blackout
# =====================
# Set a custom error document for 503 errors
ErrorDocument 503 /503_sopa.html
# Cause all requests (except images) to generate a 503 error,
# which will produce the custom 503 error document
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} !=503
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g?|png|gif) [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !robots\.txt$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR} ^2012
RewriteCond %{TIME_MON} ^01
RewriteCond %{TIME_DAY} ^18
RewriteRule ^ - [L,R=503]
# =====================
# NOT SOPA Blackout
# =====================
# My other rewrite magic goes here.
</IfModule>
Additionally, I’ve shamelessly stolen the php.net SOPA 503 page because it is awesome.