Miscellaneous
Permalink changes have continued to mess up my blog
Periodically, I have been surfing my own blog, and have found that things aren’t working how they should be.
Like today, for example, I figured out that none of the links in the right hand sidebar would consistently work. It depended what you were viewing, and if you had already clicked a topic, none of the links would work. After I changed my permalink structure a few weeks back, all relative links no longer worked, they have to now be absolute. So, my javascript menus weren’t working because my link to the script file was relative, and subsequently, all of the links in the right side didn’t work because they were linking to relative variables. So, today, I changed the permalink structure yet again, including the month and the year in the path so I could link directly to past months of posts, like I do for my Daily Life section.
So, I apologize to those that have felt like navigating my site lately has been a terrible experience. I need help in finding these problems, and I know there are probably a ton of broken images still….not sure how to find the time to fix those when I have to go one by one. If you see something, visit my contact page and let me know about it so I can get it fixed and be a little less embarrassed as I learn on a live site.
But hopefully, for now, the right side links should work again and I’ll do my best to find any other problems the blog is having.
This month I had 4 Gigs of traffic, and over 2000 unique users. Supposedly:) That is what Cpanel says. I did recently activate Google Analytics, I need to check out what that says for the past week when I was gone to get a more accurate snapshot of my web traffic.
Tutorial for setting up custom permalink structure in WordPress
Changing the permalink structure of my posts had been on my to do list for my WordPress based Rotheblog for quite some time, if not a month after I launched the redesign. I knew my apache server was configured with mod_rewrite available, so I didn’t have to worry about my server not supporting permalinking.
Short Sidebar
Don’t know if your server supports permalinks?
In your .htaccess file put this line of code;
RewriteEngine On
If the engine is not turned on, usually you will get a 505 error screen under certain configurations of Apache. If you don’t get an error, the engine is probably on.
I thought you might be able to figure this out by using phpinfo();, but that was the designer in me not understanding that that function is for php and you are looking for an apache config in httpd.conf.
I had tried setting permalinks up once before, updating my permalink structure in the admin control panel interface, but unsure what to do next as my website links were broken. I thought maybe I had to give my .htaccess certain permissions to allow the system to write the rules to it, but I didn’t make time to explore it in depth. WordPress should update that .htaccess file for you when you change the structure, but double check. Download the file yourself and look.
Turned out today, I tried again without exploring much more in depth, and got permalinking to work. I was nervous, not completely understanding the mod_rewrite engine, that any dynamic links pointing to my site would now be broken. But, the rewrite works on those links, no matter where they are.
Originally, my links were the default, and looked like this;
I added these rules to my Options > Permalinks > Custom Field
/%post_id%/%postname%
This will use the unique post id and then add it to the slug name of the post, which is dynamically generated from the title of the post. (Or it can be entered manually) My links will now look something like this;
www.rotheblog.com/1611/enabling-setup-permalinks-structure-wordpress
Then, all I did was download my empty .htaccess file from the server, and add these rules to it, and publish;
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
I found that these two sites were all I needed to setup my permalinking structure
Now, I can have those keyword rich search engine friendly link titles available to use to my advantage.
For those of you who zoned out in the first sentence and are asking, “How does this affect me?” It doesn’t. It just means that my blog should be a touch easier to find in Google now that the link structure isn’t a variable name anymore.
Questions? Having issues yourself on how to setup your own permalinking structure? Leave a comment and I will help you out as best I can. If I can do it, so can anyone else.
Cute and Funny Dog Photo
I came across this dog photo on istockphoto.com today and found myself laughing hysterically out loud at work much to my embarrassment.
Cute, content little dog (not my preferred breed, but serves the purpose) mid stride with a big ‘ol rubber chicken in his craw. Captures the moment perfectly.
I know there are sites out there dedicated just to cute pet photos, and this probably doesn’t touch the adorable level, but I wanted to remember today with this photo at least:)
Simpsonize Me – Sarah Rothe
I never did post this, and saw it on my desktop this morning so I thought I would.
Here is Sarah’s version of herself that she did in August on the Simpsonize Me website. The dog is there only because we have a dog, you don’t really get choices with that. Otherwise, the rendition didn’t come out all that close. There may be some small features that are the same, but mine looks a lot closer that is for sure. My mom had a similar experience, I wonder if it truly was the women that had a harder time finding matches.
Rotheblog 2.0 (WordPress) Launched!
After over two long months of work, I am putting out my informal “Beta” launch of the revised Rotheblog.com.
I assume that there will be some bugs, and I hope that all of you will tell me about them. Email me at rothecreations at gmail dot com if you find something that doesn’t work, or just visit my contact page to get a hold of me that way.
If something is hard for you to find, drop me a line. I want this to be as easy as possible to navigate with all of the ranges of different content I now have going on here.
I do hope some of you will make comments. I know I had this feature temporarily available before in the Movies section, but that was very specific. Now, you can make a comment anywhere just about, so I really look forward to seeing some of that.
Hope you like it, it was a hard decision when I started, and it was a lot of hard work, but I think it will be well worth it in the end.
~Jeff
WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)
WordPress 2.3 is supposed to be released as a final version today. RC1 was released late last Monday for people to do final testing before the published release.
Fortunately my site isn’t really live yet, so testing out the RC1 wouldn’t be a big deal. But I decided to just install a fresh version on a different server and do the testing I needed.
I wanted to make sure some of my plugins worked, specifically Kimili Flash Plugin and WP-Sticky. Both of them worked like a charm. I did some testing to see if they had upgraded any of the HTML editing in TinyMCE, the WYSIWYG editor, but it doesn’t appear so. I think the editor still strips empty tags and “div” tags.
But at the very least, I am really getting into these releases. This is a fairly big one. It adds tag support, which is huge for SEO purposes. It also adds auto checker for plugin updates and release updates for the software.
I will probably end up upgrading later this week.
Finished Movies, onto Galleries
There were a ton of entries, the system counted 231 entries alone for movies. And that is how many movies I have watched in two and a half years. If I think about it too hard, I get really depressed.
Hopefully before the end of next week I can start and finish the galleries section, move onto the holes in the arcade posts, and then finally start customizing the site to how I want it to look.
