Monday, August 23, 2004
ISAPI Rewrite for WordPress
One of the biggest perks of running Apache as opposed to IIS is a nice native rewrite engine. Apache’s mod_rewrite can make most urls super-clean in just a few lines. Luckily IIS has a decent answer for it, although not native. ISAPI Rewrite from Helicon Tech is an ISAPI filter that works in a very, very similar manner as mod_rewrite. They have a free version, the biggest drawback being you can’t use it site-to-site, it’s only for global rewrites. The full version, currently at $69 (with some decent discounts starting at just 2 server licenses) allows you to go site-to-site with the filter.
I found a few leads about how people translated mod_rewrite for WordPress to ISAPI rewrite. Few were doing me any good until I came across DA Williams’ post at Blue Crescent Tech. In fact, I was able to almost use his rules out of the box. For one thing, I did not have to delete the line relating to the comments feed that he said he had to delete. The other was that it seemed he had no line to rewrite the main feed link that WordPress uses. Following the simple conversion instructions he left I was able to add it back into my httpd.ini file easily.
What I added to my httpd.ini file:
RewriteRule /archives/category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&feed=$5 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/([_0-9a-z-]+)/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [I,U,O]
RewriteRule /comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [I,U,O]
I’m glad I got it working here, seems to be giving me no troubles and is super fast (so far). I hope to implement this on quite a few other sites.
Sunday, August 22, 2004
The Palm
So tonight was good, shared a six-pound lobster with my girlfriend at The Palm. An early birthday dinner from my parents. Fewer dinners are better then huge lobsters cooked well and this one was pretty damn good.
Not sure about the rest of the night, it’s still fairly early, we didn’t go out until a little after midnight last night and I’m still waiting for a few people to call, but I think tonight may be a movie night anyway… nothing exciting, but hey, the lobster was good.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
And so it starts
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. In fact, it’s something I semi-started a while back and put on hold, deleted and then restarted it again.
So why blog? Right now it’s to simply share a voice. Pretty much the same reason anyone else does.
I think we all want to set topics when we first start. Most just want to throw out an opinion or link to cool things they find and I’m not far off from that.
Subjects should be technology, sports (heavy on the hockey I’m sure), movies, television, video games for when I find the time, along with anything else that crosses my path that I deem worthy. I’ll also throw in a run-on sentence or two.
A design will be coming here eventually, but until then I’m just going to have a very simple design. Easy on the eyes and easy on the loading time - for now.
One of my main issues was which domain to use. vodkafish.com? VodkaFish has been a name I’ve been using online for almost 10 years. It’s not exactly the most professional thing in the world, but it’s not like it’s on my business cards. So what to do? Use it? Use another generic name? I’d love to get a variation of my real name, but all those domains have been taken for quite some time. I asked a few people and they all said “vodkafish.com” - of course, they already know me as VodkaFish and what I’m about is already also known to them. But in the end this is the logical choice. A name I use on a slew of sites, it’s here to use and hell, it somehow already has a Google PR of 2 to build upon.
And so it begins… I step into the blogsphere or whatever catchphrase they’re using today…