Question

I’m looking into kill switch alternatives. The people I’m working with don’t like that the css kill switch makes the screen black and have asked for a kill switch that remotely redirects to a subfolder once activated. So when the kill switch is activate on our server the kill switch will redirect from http://www.domain.com to http://www.domain.com/oldsite/ which will hold their old site files. Is there a solution like this?

Answer 1

You can use the same trick they’re using, but with JavaScript.

First, in the head of their document, add this link to a JavaScript file on your server:

<script src="http://your-server.com/kill-switches/offending-site.js"></script>

Then, in your server’s root, create a folder with the name kill-switches. In there, create a file named offending-site.js, and put this in that file:

window.location = 'http://offending-site.com/oldsite';

Then, just comment/uncomment that line as need.

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Note: Keep in mind that this is as unfoolproof as the CSS Kill Switch. Your client could just remove that script line and be done with it.

P.S. Be sure to serve non-caching headers, or it won’t work.