In a way, it’s ironic. My first web site started off on a Linux server, but when I wanted to use ASP for my site, I had to transfer to a Windows Server. About 4 years have gone by since, and I’d recently installed Wordpress, but I ran into many difficulties:
Permalinks
A permalink is the URL leading to a single blog post. It can look ugly like
http://www.pibbit.com/?p=17
but I want it to look descriptive like
http://www.pibbit.com/2007/07/27/wii-gamer-girl-drawing/
The Permalink document on Wordpress’s site offered excellent information in making this happen, specifically using Permalinks without mod_rewrite because I have Windows hosting. By creating a php.ini file at the root with 2 lines of code:
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0
I am at least allowed to use the “almost pretty” form of Permalinks (note the inserted “index.php”):
http://www.pibbit.com/index.php/2007/07/27/wii-gamer-girl-drawing/
It took me a while to get over the file name in the URL, but then one day, my friend tells me he is unable to leave a comment. You see, I have a plug-in called Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam that creates CAPTCHAs to prevent bots from spamming my blog, but the image no longer came up.
Long story short, the php.ini file interfered with the php gd() library (needed to dynamically “draw” the CAPTCHAs ). So I was faced with a decision - either have user-friendlier “almost pretty” permalinks, or less comment spam with CAPTCHAs… I wanted both!
The WordPress document provides other work-arounds for Windows Servers (one involves using error pages…a solution that made me uncomfortable), but because I’d already spent days researching and tearing my hair out over this, I made a decision to get Linux server hosting.
I transferred my blog over, and this is what I did to get pretty Permalinks to work:
and at the root, place an .htaccess file with code generated by WordPress found under Options -> Permalinks -> (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Simple! The end!
