Zac Garrett

When dealing with clean URLs it usually means some complex regex for each and every single type of content. When using lighttpd and wordpress there is a much simplifier solution, 404 rewrites. All you need to do is add an error handler to your lighttpd.conf and a single line of php  to your theme.

The first step is to add the following to lighttpd.conf for the domain:

server.error-handler-404 = “/index.php?error=404″

The next step is to make sure your actual 404 page gives the 404 error. In your templates 404.php you need to add the following to the top of the file:

 <?php header(”HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found”); ?>

Once you get these two settings in place you will be able to set the custom permalinks to whatever you would like.

After a year of using Serendipity it is time to go with something else. I’ve converted the site to Wordpress and created a WP theme out of my old s9y template. For the most part you should not notice too much different. Since I did start from near scratch with this theme it should be fairly lightweight. I might be missing some WP specific styles, but I’ve got it looking fairly good.

Links to posts are going to change quite a bit from the old version. At the moment I’ve not taken the time to use lighttpd rewrites as of the moment. I would suggest not bookmarking anything for the next few days as they will likely break.

For RSS subscribers nothing should change. I’ve been running feedburer for a long time and it should continue to work. You might want to verify that your feed is pointing to http://feeds.zacgarrett.com/tech-geek.

If you notice any massive problems please feel free to contact me.

It has been nearly a month since my first encounter with Media Temple and it is time to look back at their service. Can this hosting actually be good enough to look over the initial reaction? Continue Reading »