Deflexion.com

htaccess excerpts and notes

2008-03-26T12:34:00.010Z

Here are some excerpts from my .htaccess files. I'm posting these because I often need to remember the syntax of these commands and it's easier to look at the commands here on my blog than to ssh to my DreamHost or Verio web-hosting account and look at them there. Also, I hope these excerpts and notes will be useful to others.

Note: In the code below, a line that begins with a single hash (#) is code that is commented out and a line that begins with two hashes (##) is a comment about the code.

Used Everywhere

## Block viewing of .htaccess files
<Files .htaccess>
  order allow,deny
  deny from all
</Files>

## Do not let IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xx access (GET) the site
## Uncomment these 5 lines if someone or something is abusing the site
## Note: 'GET' can be replaced by 'GET POST PUT'
# <Limit GET>
#   order allow,deny
#   allow from all
#   deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xx
# </Limit>

## If a directory is requested, do not list the files in the directory
Options -Indexes

## Next is sometimes needed, but might already be set in the server configuration
# AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

## Next is needed if you use Rewrite rules
## (examples of RewriteCond and RewriteRule are in the sections below)
RewriteEngine On

## Next Rewrite option is often already set in the server configuration
## Uncomment if Rewrite rules don't work
# Options +FollowSymLinks

The next sections include examples that use the Apache mod_rewrite module. If they seem confusing, it's because they are! As Brian Behlendorf, one of the primary developers of the Apache web server, said:

“The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail.”

This quote, along with some other good quotes, is on the Apache Documentation mod_rewrite page.

Used at Deflexion.com

## Specify the MIME type of unknown file extensions
## This is needed because I use extensionless URLs at Deflexion.com
## If default is HTML, use:
# DefaultType text/html
## If default is PHP, use:
DefaultType application/x-httpd-php

## If URL points to a directory, serve the first of these files that exist
DirectoryIndex index index.php index.html index.atom

## PHP include files are located in this directory
php_value include_path "/path/i/do/not/want/to/publish/on/my/blog/_shared"

## If 'http://deflexion.com/index' is requested, remove 'index'
## The goal is to get people & machines to link to 1 & only 1 URL for this page
## Details at Wikipedia's URL normalization
## More examples of URL canonicalization are in the Infinite Ink section below
## Note: '^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /' matches GET POST PROPFIND etc, followed by space slash
## This RewriteCond avoids infinite loops
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index$ http://deflexion.com/ [R=301,L]

## Redirect this local URL-path to the current URL
Redirect permanent /messaging/blogs/ http://deflexion.com/2004/01/just-what-is-blog-atomizing

## For details about these RedirectMatch lines, see
## Twitter, TinyURL, Dots, Dashes, and My htaccess File
## Note: The order of these 5 RedirectMatch lines matters!
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5-$6
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3-$4
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2
              ^^^
              '301' is equivalent to 'permanent'

Used at Infinite Ink

## If the requested hostname is anything other than www.ii.com,
## rewrite it to www.ii.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.ii.com$ 
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.ii.com/$1 [R=301,L]

## Remove trailing 'index.html' from requested URLs
## See Note above about the regular expression '^[A-Z](3,9}\ /'
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.html$ http://www.ii.com/$1 [R=301,L]

## Redirect this local URL-path to the current URL
Redirect permanent /communicate http://deflexion.com/2005/12/make-meta-comment

Comments, suggestions, and questions are welcome!

Twitter, TinyURL, Dots, Dashes, and My htaccess File

2008-03-25T08:57:00.005Z

After a number of experiments and reading & participating in the twitter-development-talk mailing list, I can now tweet about updates to my pages without Twitter converting my URLs to TinyURLs. First, here's what I've learned about Twitter and TinyURLs:

If a URL path in a tweet contains only forward slashes (/), dots (.), and alphanumeric characters, Twitter does not convert the URL to a TinyURL.

I plan to start tweeting about pages when I update them and if a page's URL contains dashes, tweet it with the dashes replaced by dots. For example, the tweet about this blog item uses this URL:

http://deflexion.com/2008/03/twitter.tinyurl.dots.dashes.and.my

The .htaccess file on my server includes this line:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(2008/../[^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)\.([^.]*)$ http://deflexion.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$5-$6

which redirects the URL to this:

http://deflexion.com/2008/03/twitter-tinyurl-dots-dashes-and-my

which is the actual URL of the blog item. This way I maintain control of URLs that lead to my pages and TinyURL does not get to track and profile people who visit my pages via my tweets.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to do this, please post a comment. For example, I'm wondering if it would be better to use RewriteCond & RewriteRule rather than RedirectMatch in my .htaccess file. Some thoughts about this are in WhenNotToUseRewrite in the Apache Documentation Wiki.

Blogger permalinks seem permanent, but are they?

2005-11-30T20:18:00.000Z

I think I've now set up Blogger and the .htaccess file [*] at my web-hosting provider so that all the reflexion archive-page URLs and the new reflexion item-page URLs (permalinks) have no extension. I want this because I don't want to be locked in to the .php extension that I've been using, for example, I might switch from PHP to another scripting language at some point in the future, and because extensionless URLs are nice [**].

What I want, but haven't been able to figure out how to do, is to change the permalink of all my old reflexions. Does anyone know how to do this in Blogger or via the Blogger API? I tried turning off "Post Pages", republishing, turning "Post Pages" back on, and republishing again, but Blogger remembers the old permalinks. I can understand why the Blogger developers would do this, since they are supposed to be permalinks, but I've used these URLs for less than a week and I can solve the problem of broken bookmarks and broken links via .htaccess tricks.

If anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment here. Or just leave a comment so I know that someone has read this -- don't be shy!

Update: It turns out that when I edit an old reflexion and then republish it, it gets a new extensionless URL. I'm slowly going through my old posts and turning on comments, removing extraneous newlines, and republishing with extensionless URLs.

[*] I use the following .htaccess lines tell the Apache web server that file names with no extension are to be interpreted as PHP files:

  DefaultType application/x-httpd-php
  DirectoryIndex index index.php index.html

[**] To learn about the value of permalinks and extensionless URLs, see:

Cool URIs don't change by Tim Berners-Lee
Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type by Mark Pilgrim
Wikipedia: Uniform Resource Locator: Clean URLs