Author: Paul Tomblin

mod_rewrite is deep magic

When I moved this blog from MovableType to WordPress, the rss feed urls changed. Since I didn’t want the livejournal syndication to break, I put in mod_rewrite RewriteRules to redirect those feed urls. When I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, what had been an extremely long .htaccess became just a few lines long, and all the fancy stuff that they used to do in .htaccess with mod_rewrite are now evidently done in index.php itself. So I’m trying to figure out how to insert new RewriteRules to do what I did before, but everything I try either does nothing, or it causes the whole blog to break with a message in the error.log file saying “mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error.”

Here is the existing .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blogs/pt/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blogs/pt/index.php
</IfModule>

I would have thought that adding the following would be sufficient:

RewriteRule index.rdf /blogs/pt/feed/
RewriteRule index.xml /blogs/pt/feed/

or possibly, since /feed/ is evidently going to be passed to index.php as arguments, like this:

RewriteRule index.rdf /blogs/pt/index.php?&feed
RewriteRule index.xml /blogs/pt/index.php?&feed

I also tried with [L] and/or [R] conditions. No luck.

I’d like to get all those syndicators working again. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

Getting there

When the Google Maps API was announced, David Megginson publically challenged me and other programmers to come up with a decent flight planning application that used it. Well, it’s not here yet, but RunwayFinder – a flight planning tool for pilots is getting closer. At least it’s a decent substitute for the “Nearest Airports” search in AirNav – you put in an airport id and it shows the ones in the neighbourhood as well.

Vacation update

I had a bunch of plans for the vacation.  Some of them actually got done.

Goals:

  • Spend time with my daughter, step-daughters and wife (partial credit – probably could have done better, but it was great to have Liane here for the first time in years even just to hang out, and we did a few fun things.)
  • Finish reading “Ajax In Action” (partial credit – read the first 10 of 13 chapters and Appendix A.)
  • Reimplement the “progress report” part of the navaid.com web site so that instead of re-drawing the entire page every 10 seconds it just grabs the actual count that’s changed and puts it into an appropriate div.  (Not even started.)
  • Add some more design notes to the NavData wiki. (Not done.)
  • Import some of the user data files I’ve been sent into the navaid.com web sites. (I did a couple, Brazil, Argentina and the UK, but I’ve got a couple more to do.)
  • Finish Half Life 2 which I got last Christmas.  I stopped last January when I had some video card problems.  (Played for 15 minutes, got to Ravenholm, got violently motion sick and stopped.)
  • Get some flying in. (Didn’t get a single day without low ceilings.)

I probably get a failing grade for that.

Ok, that’s annoying

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a few days ago.  I just noticed today that the comment count isn’t incrementing when people post comments (although they do decrement when I delete a test comment).  So there’s all those posts on my main page that say “Comments (0)” even though they have comments.  And they’re not showing up in my “unread comments” plugin either.

I think I’m going to have to try turning off some plugins to see if that makes a difference.  I hope it’s not SpamKarma.