�Patience, grasshoppah�
2000-04-13, 15:00:00:

I used to pride myself on technical ability when I was young. Now I sit and stare at something for hours wondering what the deal with it is.

To become technically proficient with anything you need a few things:

• a fairly broad technical background to provide a framework in which to work,
• documentation on the subject at hand,
• access to the thing that you want to become proficient with, preferably fairly unrestricted access so If It's Broke, You Can Fix It�,
• patience.

I am starting to think I lack that last one.

I have decided I need to do Kirk's website, get it done, and if he can't get in gear then it's his problem. I mean, I need something to show people when they ask, I am ready for it to be done, I want to move on to working on something else, move on, find a new job, get of here so Moogie can finish self-destructing all on her own, etc.

Therefore, I have decided to face two basic problems with doing his website.

First, I designed it more like I would a personal site. I realized after looking at Amazon.com and a couple others that you really need to make it easy to buy and find what you want. Looking nice is all well and good, but the idea is to sell product. So... time to rewrite. Anyway, I keep having these epiphanies where background processes thinking about various parts of the site go, "oh, shit, that'd be a good way to do that," anyway, so it could stand being redone.

However, the other is that search engines are persnickity about dynamic content. They don't want to index sites with '?' or 'cgi' or 'php' in the URL. Sooo... I need to fix it.

Common solution on Apache webservers? mod_rewrite. Fair enough.

I've stared at the documentation, the "documentation for dummies," and tinkering with rewrite rules for hours. Nothing works, including the examples, until my eyes have started to bleed.

I grok regular expressions and Unix just fine. Sure, Apache doesn't really like to use .htaccess for some reason. I just don't grok what's fucked up here.

Given this, and all the Hell I went through with the web server just not wanting to pass pretty damned standard environment variables to PHP, I think I've come to the conclusion that their webhost is just badly misconfigured, or configured to be outright unfriendly.

Now, I could always download Apache for Win32 (it comes installed with mod_rewrite, I believe, but I haven't acquired Visual Studio yet, so I can't build it myself from the source if it isn't) and play with it there, but why bother when it won't make a difference to the final product?

What I can do, that is so kludgy, is make a directory for dynamic content (let's call it "dynamic"), and put in an .htaccess file that has the line

ForceType application/x-httpd-php3

in it. This will force all accesses from that directory to be processed as a PHP script. Then I can just write a PHP script called, say, script (note, not script.php3, just script), so if I call the path:

http://domain.com/dynamic/script/this/is/all/fake/path/

After I call that path, I can check the variable $REQUEST_URI

Like I said, a kludge. I like elegant solutions, and mod_rewrite would give me one - if it worked.

What I wouldn't give to have my own server sitting somewhere. Sigh.