Apache tricks

I use a couple of simple .htaccess tricks to help create more human-friendly URLs. Most of these hacks use mod_rewrite, and none are particularly esoteric. The comments in the following extract from the site-wide .htaccess should explain what’s going on:

# This little trick allows me to rename the blosxom
# script from the cumbersome script.cgi format to
# something simpler (in this case, 'sam'):

  SetHandler cgi-script

# Rewrite rules:
RewriteEngine On

# As I prefer to use just 'sgp.me.uk' as the base
# domain, this rule redirects requests for
# 'www.sgp.me.uk'.  This both allows the use of the
# 'www.' prefix while hopefully encouraging people
# not to use it by visibly redirecting rather than
# simply rewriting.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.sgp\.me\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sgp.me.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

# Pages devoted to baby photos have been integrated
# into my blog. This rule preserves the old
# hierarchy and provides me with a really simple
# URL to point family to for these photos:
RewriteRule ^uma(.*)$ /sam/uma$1

# I liked the idea of losing the required
# 'index.$flavour' suffixes for rss feeds:
RewriteRule ^sam(.*)/rss$ /sam$1/index.rss
RewriteRule ^sam(.*)/rdf$ /sam$1/index.rdf

Blosxom configuration

The site uses Blosxom 2.0. The script has been slightly modified to remove the code used to escape HTML when outputting RSS (see this post for more information on this and a patch). I also use the following plugins, some of which I wrote myself:

• atomfeed
• cooluri
• entries_index
• find
• flavourdir
• hide (modified)
• lastmodified
• logger (Awaiting write-up. An old version can be found here.)
• nice_title
• rss10
• xhtmlmime

Standards

The website is designed to be accessible in all of the major browsers (having said that, it does render best in Firefox because of -moz-border-radius). It uses vaguely semantic HTML for structure and CSS for layout. The HTML template is written to validate against the XHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype, and the xhtmlmime plugin means that non-well-formed entries quickly get picked up. The RSS feeds are all validated against the Feed Validator from time to time.

To do

• application/xhtml+xml – done!
• Sort out some better page titles – done!
• Comments/Writebacks
• Tags (think del.icio.us). Probably implement this using a hacked version of the meta plugin
• Atom feed, once the spec is finalised – done!
• More stuff as I think of it
• Oh yeah, actually post some real content