I am so like my father. A week ago Friday, that 89-year-old participated in a dance contest at the retirement apartments where he lives. For two months leading up to the contest, he became so fixated on it, he could hardly talk about anything else. Very cute.
I know this feeling. For the past two months, I’ve been fixated on a problem with this web site to the point where I was getting ready to move the whole site from the Windows IIS server to a Linux server.
Today, I fixed it. I’m not so much dancing with the stars as dancing in the stars with happiness.
I thought I had it fixed back in March but the solution turned out to be too complicated and didn’t work in all situations.
The solution I was using, IsapiRewriter4, had to be installed on the server by my host service and required that I write a rule into an .ini file every single time I added a blog post or page to this site. I did this so that the rewriter would take URLs that look like this
http://brianvhunt.com/?page_id=109
and make them look like this
http://brianvhunt.com/portfolio
This is important because friendly URLs are easier to remember, easier to understand, and they’re good for search engine optimization. The problem bedevils many people who use shared hosting for a WordPress-powered web site on a Windows IIS server. There are a number of solutions on the web, most of them complicated and requiring knowledge of programming a bit over my fairly technical head.
The solution was to install Andy Stratton’s rewrite plugin for WordPress, activate it, and put a .htaccess file in the root of my web site.
This is incredibly easy to do. If you’re at all technical and can mess around in the css file in WordPress, you can do this. If you need help, see Andy’s blog or contact me.
It’s funny what an incredible feeling of satisfaction I got out of fixing this. I just added this post and for the first time since building the site, the page just works without any special edits to a separate file.
I feel like my weekend has been really fruitful.
What small thing have you done lately that gave you a great feeling of satisfaction?
