Kitsimons

Journal Feed

I knew that my host, 1&1, were updating their servers and immediately assumed the worse. I got on the horn to 1&1 technical support, though I really didn't expect them to be of any help. To my surprise, the technical support bod I spoke to quickly announced the issue had been resolved. A visit to www.kitsimons.com confirmed the homepage was again accessible.

My relief was predictably shortlived. It wasn't until I had put the phone down that I realised 1&1's solution had been to trash my .htaccess file, completely scuppering Textpattern's URL re-writing in the process (Textpattern is the CMS used to power kitsimons.com). In short, no pages other than the homepage could be viewed.

I put aside my disbelief that 1&1's technical support had thought removing a domain's .htaccess file would not have any ramifications, and set about trying to fix the problem.

After much hair-pulling - which I assure you there would have been if I had any hair - I found a solution. I changed a single line in my .htaccess file from this;

RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php

To this;

RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.php

Spot the difference? 1&1's server update apparently required the addition of a forward-slash before index.php. So, if anyone else out there running Textpattern with clean-urls on a 1&1 server is having the same issue, give that a whirl.

I'm not particularly well versed with the ins and outs of Apache mod_rewrite rules, but problems like this really bewilder me. It's quite humbling to think a single missing forward-slash can bring down a website after a server update.

I believe I shall ponder upon this, and other philosophical notions of equal grandeur, when I curl up in bed this evening.

NB: I should point out I'm aware that the preceding slash essentially makes it an absolute path to the site root, whereas previously it would have been a relative path. What baffles me is the did work/didn't work situation.