Archive for February, 2009

Configuring Leopard’s Apache to work with all Rewrite Rules

Although there are a few blog posts out there detailing how to enable .htaccess on Mac OSX 10.5. I didn’t find anything that could help me with a problem I had with a specific RewriteRule.

This post isn’t specific to Leopard but maybe useful to users of this OS due to the default values that it’s pre-installed Apache’s httpd.conf comes set with.

Say for SEO reasons you wanted to rewrite

product.php?id=17

as

product/toaster/17.html

You could use the following rewrite rule:

RewriteRule ^product/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+)\.html$ product.php?id=$2

In other blogs it will tell you that you will need to change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All in the <Directory “/Library/Webserver/Documents”> of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf and perhaps also in any conf files found in /private/etc/apache2/users. (This is not enabled by default on Leopard).

What they won’t neccesarily tell you is that to get rewrite rules like the above working you need to remove MultiViews from your Options list, leaving you with something like this :

<Directory "/Library/Webserver/Documents">
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride All
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
</Directory>

I hope this saves someone the trouble I went through this morning trying to figure it out.

For a quick explanation see the short but sweet Apache Multiviews are evil

MarkB

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Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 apache, configuration, osx No Comments

The Seven Year Itch

Our new website is finally online. And I wish I could stress that “finally” in the same way as the thought of the pending website has haunted me for the last 12 months at least.

I am a web designer and I have been creating websites for people for nearly 10 years, but for some reason I couldn’t sign off even a single detail of our sparkly new site. I did the planning, the content gathering, the sketching, the mocking up, but something was always unsatisfactory to me and had to scrap, re-think, re-plan, re-arrange, re-design over and over again.

What was wrong with me?

The official line was that I could really only work on our website after I’d spent the most productive part of the day pouring my genius on clients’ projects and was therefore drained of any creativity (and probably  brain activity too).

A couple of weeks ago, we decided it was time to link our website to our latest project Leonecasa.it, but horror…. and our new site was nowhere near finished and our current website was an old and stale, 600×800 res. fella that hadn’t had a makeover for the last 7 years.

So the decision was taken to put up a temporary simple page, where we could present our most recent work and then develop it and evolve it, when we had time.

Now that the new site - ehm…the new (single) page - is up, I feel a lot better and it seems that I am finally coming to terms with what was holding the whole project back. I hereby pronounce as the culprit,  a vicious mixture of:

1. irresistible desire to show off

2. unnecessary quest for innovation

3. tendency to be overly critical (aka trying to remove any source of possible criticism)

Thinking about it now, it appears obvious that what we needed wasn’t anything fancy, just a simple straightforward showcase of our work, which is already in its own right the best proof of our abilities and creativity that you can get.

So, for the time being, our original, ambitious design that aimed to make the best of our CSS, AJAX and Flash skills to create an all-singing, all-dancing showcase, is resting in my virtual draw.

The idea of adding to and improving the existing pages to create something alive and evolving, is instead gaining momentum.

Silvia

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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 webdesign No Comments