I am currently doing some minor re-work on a friend's site. I have downloaded what she has currently, but all of the links are absolute links, so whenever I navigate within the locally hosted site, I am pushed to the live site. Instead of overwriting all of those links (on each page, in the database, etc.), I would like to "reroute" any links going to "www.google.com" for example to "localhost/project". Is there an easy way to do this with something like an htaccess file? I should also mention that it is a wordpress site, if there is some other way to go about this.
There are several ways:
1) Edit your /etc/hosts.txt file and add a line for "127.0.0.1 www.google.com". (That file is in system32, I think for windows) Don't forget to remove that entry when you're done.
2) Do a search-and-replace on the files while editing. Something like perl -i.bak -pe 's/www.google.com/localhost/' *.html would work.
3) Use a proxy that can modify data. https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole
4) Use greasemonkey or similar to modify the page via javascript.