Troidus

After about a year of ducking from a real design, here we go.

Thanking the academy

Thanks tons to Anton and Chris for the logo and the PHP help, respectively. Great work, you guys. Also, thanks to all the WordPress IRC users, who chipped in now and again, helping with various tidbits of code. Thanks to my parents, for the gracious bandwidth, and now, as the music starts, enjoy!

About Steven

Steven is a non-existent person. That’s it. Really. No, really.

My new design, just off the corner, relies heavily on some severe mod_rewriting. So, you can imagine my surprise, when, after upgradin to WP 2.0, I found a .htaccess file that wouldn’t take custom rewrites, thanks to WordPress’ internal rewriting.

After trawling through the forums, I found it littered with requests for custom mod_rewriting rules, yet, very little info. It seems that WordPress generates the following rewrite rule when editing .htaccess and adds values via it’s internal files and the database!

1. <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
2. RewriteEngine On
3. RewriteBase /
4. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
5. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
6. RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
7. </IfModule>
8. Download this code: /code/7c.txt

As you can see, it’s not possible to simply edit this file. As of writing this post, I still haven’t been able to edit the rules. If anyone knows how to do it, kindly, do help.

I will post an update if and when I get a hack/solution.

After reading Mathias’ rant about his URI (URL, URI, IRI, what the hell?), I’ve decided to choose something simple for my site as well.

When I first started out blogging, I was using the most heavily used and most clunky structure known to blogland, that of /archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/. I mean, it was huge. I believe every blog worth its money at that time had this awkward structure going for it. It was around this time that the slew of URL snippers were born. But that’s not the point of this.

The point is, what part of the scheme is important? Obviously, /archives/ did little more than add the notion that this was, infact, a blog. The next part, /yyyy/mm/dd/ is the important one, cause it helps categorise your entried by date posted, and lets people easily remember then. The /post-name/ part is obviously important, being the name, after all.

But I figured, people surf around 40~60 sites daily, on an average. Right? So, is it really feasible for someone to remember the dates his bookmarked articles were created? Moreover, is it really necessary for him to remember them? Thanks to bookmark managers, no-one remembers the URI anymore. The URI’s serve the simple function of filling up the address bar, nowadays.

Hence, I decided to go with a clutterfree address bar for both of my readers. I thought about using /blog/post-id, but I found the word “blog” everywhere. Literally. So, I went with the simple, unobstrutive, easy to use /article/post-id