mod_rewrite

For those of you who’ve played around the inner workings of Apache, or even just done some of the fairly standard stuff with it, you may have at some point stumbled across mod_rewrite. Its actually an incredibly flexible tool when it comes to web servers, allowing all kinds of back end functionality to ease administration, all completely invisible to the users and clients viewing the pages. Great stuff.

Getting it to work, however, is like trying to wrestle honey from a bear. Boy, thats a dumb analogy. Juice from a stone? Whatever, it sucks. To quote Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Group, “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.” And I suppose that doesn’t make sense unless you grok sendmail. Oh well, geek humor is like that.

In any case, I finally wrestled the damn thing into the ground and got it working. It makes the permalinks aspect of wordpress package function. Thats goodness. It also is required for some packages and plugins to install and work correctly, all goodness as well. One of which is the Gallery photo website thinger. My initial playing around with it shows good potential. The only downside is there is no ‘clean’ integration into your typical blog software. I’ll keep hunting around.

In other news, my powerbook should ship today. Joy. Word as of yesterday from eBay was “we’re close”. Not too much longer now, I don’t think.