Urban Giraffe

I've got a substantial update to Redirection just about finished off and ready for release. Rather than dropping this out and running the risk of upsetting a lot of websites, I've decided to try a private beta-test to iron out any final problems.

The new version gives much better management of redirections and error logging, and adds very powerful support for native Apache .htaccess files (i.e. you can use Redirection to edit .htaccess). If this sounds like something you want to help out with then drop me a line. The only requirement for this is that you are familiar with backing up and restoring your site database, or that you have a test WordPress site. The biggest help will be from people who are already using Redirection and have data to import into the new version.

Thanks in advance for any help!

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Some work I've been doing recently has involved debugging a Mambo installation. The website had developed the curious ability to block the editing of certain articles, but allowed other ones through. These blocked attempts to save articles were resulting in a '406 Not Acceptable' error.

According to the W3 specification, this means:

The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the request.

Say what?

After a lot of hair-pulling I tracked the problem

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We generally become WordPress users to create a blog for everyone to see. This can involve the purchasing of a domain name and web hosting. These we treat as black boxes on which the WordPress software is installed, and everything magically works. This is exactly how it should be.

Although WordPress provides a comprehensive management interface, there are times when it would be better to have our own local copy, running on our own machine. There are several reasons we would want to do this:

• A working backup of our online site
• A development site to develop plugins and themes without affecting our online site
• A testing area to try out hacks and new versions of WordPress without fear of corrupting the live site
• A staging area to create and verify posts, before releasing them live

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In previous guides we have concentrated on the building blocks of creating a WordPress theme. A basic design structure has been defined, followed by enclosing header and footer elements, and finished off with a navigational guide. While important aspects of any blog, they are secondary to its main purpose: the content.

In this fourth and final part we carefully dissect the process of taking the content from WordPress and arranging it on screen. Attention is paid to the many alternative methods of grouping this information, from the many posts of the front page to search results and archives.

We will look at how WordPress distributes the responsibility for this work, and how everything is tied together with the all-seeing all-knowing construct known as ‘The Loop’.

By the end of this guide we will not only have a fully working theme, but we should have enough experience and knowledge of WordPress to be able to extend our theme beyond the basic design presented here.

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I've decided to change my hosting company.

I am prepared for a lot of pain and suffering, but so far it's going rather smoothly. This wasn't some well thought out decision, but rather a fit of activity after becoming frustrated with the averageness of GoDaddy, my current host.

Finding a decent host is a real chore, and I came to this conclusion pretty soon the first time round. The internet is flooded with copy-cat hosting companies who are mostly resellers that buy bandwidth from real companies. Even their websites all look the same, with identical prices, identical features, and identical hidden setup fees. This makes me both weary and wary.

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