Playing with Rewrite Rules

While setting up my own webblahhg before school start I came across an annoying problem when clean urls were enabled (note: I’m using Textpattern instead of Movable Type¹. In order to change messy urls like

http://itp.nyu.edu/~llh223/notes/?s=article&c=howtos

into

http://itp.nyu.edu/~llh223/notes/article/cateogory/howtos

on itp.nyu.edu Rewrite Rules are needed. TxP would normally work out of the box (it comes with a .htaccess with the necessary rewrite rules) but I was getting “Page Unavailable errors.” After messing with things a bit I realized all requests were getting rerouted to the itp main site instead of my site. Ah, and it just so happens that II’d completely missed the commented out solution. Adding this line to my .htaccess file fixed everything.

RewriteBase /~NETID/blog_folder/

So, if you’re playing with mod_rewrite and having any trouble make sure you’re working from the right place.

¹ Also note that in order to use a blogging system like TxP, you’ll need a MySQL account (ie: you’ll need to kindly ask Nancy).