Going Black Against SOPA / PIPA

I will be going black onξWednesdayξJanuary 18, 2012 to protest theξStop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Along with other sites, my complete website / blog will be temporarily shut down with a 503 HTTP Status code to let the search engines know that the site will be back. I will be reconnecting the website on Thursday and all of the articles on the site will be back and the complete website will be working as normal.

Here is the PHP code that you will need if you wish to make your website black to protest as well, just add the following snippet before your main template file for your CMS or your main header file

<?php

 header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');

 header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');

 header('Retry-After: 7200'); // in seconds

?>

After this code you can add any HTML to show users that you are temporarily off. The code above will only let the search engines robots know that you are temporarily down but that you will be back in 7200 seconds. You can change this to your desired time or you can also add a specific date.

As always please leave any comments / concerns or questions online.