TheGarage Tech Blog

I noticed over the weekend that my domain dcdo isn’t working. The tip off was that I wasn’t getting any spam in my inbox. How likely is that not to happen, really? Ping returns the new IP address but doesn’t reply. Probably some further adjustment to the DNS records needs to be made.

I haven’t taken the time to mess with the DNS issues because I haven’t been here much except for on weekends and this past weekend I was busy trying to figure out how to run WordpressMU; the multi-blog, mult-user version of the software I am running now. This is a key step in the process of changing my infrastructure from Domino to hosted WordPress. It wont be any fun maintaining and posting to a half-dozen or so blogs that each have a seperate installation.

Like on the other thing I got it working half-assed but then I had to keep tinkering with it to make it work how I want it too. The closest configuration I found as a model was from Dan Frey at the Office of the Provost Web Team blog at the University at Buffalo:

“Our situation is interesting, but I would not call it unique. We have a server that has multiple domains pointed at it. We installed MU in a directory off of the root of our server, /wordpressmu. Our default domain name is ugly – the idea was that we wanted folks to be able to go to nicedomain.buffalo.edu and get to their blog on our server.

Easier said than done…

Yep pretty much what I’ve found out. My situation is the same except I want to point any domain to any blog regardless of where the blog is and regardless of where the domain is. This is what I have so far:

I know the symlinks are the way to go and that’s how I found Dan Frey’s article–by Googling wordpress mu symbolic link. I’m pretty sure Dan has it figured out I just have to tinker with it some more.

But dang I can’t mess around with it forever. It’s one of those deals that I’ll have to revisit after I get a few other things worked out, like my damn mailserver at dcdo.

It seems me SSI is not working properly on cgwwff. Suddenly my footer with all the nav buttons and sitemeter and whatnot isn’t showing. Dammit it’s always something.

UPDATE: It was the old XBitHack trick. My .htaccess file was”renewed” somehow in the process of all the domain changes and blog reconfigurations and the problems therewith. I was using the XBitHack for cgwwff to implement server side includes for my footer without having to change the file name of all the pages to an .shtml file extension, which is required for the server to process includes. XBitHack tells the server to scan all pages with the executable bit set so I can just chmod +x *.html and presto all my web pages will be scanned for the include footer directive.

It’s important to enable this for only those pages that need it as a slight burden is placed on the server for each page scanned for includes. No since in incurring an unnecessary burden on the server for pages that don’t even have an include, eh.