Anyone got Dreamhost to do 301 redirects in tandem with removing #eecms index.php? Weird query string stuff happening.

Well, having a bit of experience working with Dreamhost, I responded. This problem isn’t specific to ExpressionEngine, it actually will apply to any website or application where you are using .htaccess to rewrite index.php out of the URLs. Dreamhost and many shared hosts like it is are set up in such a way that .htaccess is always a bit more painful than usual, using the query string URI protocol. (Not that .htaccess isn’t painful to begin with.)

A typical .htaccess file on one of these hosts would look like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [QSA]

That works out fine until you want to add some 301 redirects into the mix. If you add a standard redirect like:

Redirect 301 /oldpath /newpath

You’ll find that instead of redirecting to www.domain.com/newpath, it ends up going to www.domain.com/newpath/?/oldpath, which isn’t good at all.

The key to fixing this is making sure that your index.php removal rule excludes your 301 redirects.

Just add this line after the RewriteEngine On line:

# put all your redirects inside the parentheses, separated by |s
RewriteCond $1 !^(old|old1|old2) [NC]

Hopefully that’s helpful to someone out there. Thanks to Jonathan for asking a question that I could actually answer.

As one of the first books out to cover the relatively recently released ExpressionEngine 2, I was eager to get my hands on it. I’ve found before that reading through books, such as Michael Boyink’s, Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site for Small Business, has been instrumental in developing a set of standards to use as I develop sites in ExpressionEngine 2.

In case you aren’t familiar with the product, ExpressionEngine 2, released in July of this year, is the latest release of EllisLab’s flagship content management system. The tool is extremely powerful, and is a top choice of web designers and developers for site-building projects that might otherwise resort the such CMSs as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the like. While ExpressionEngine isn’t free, and many of it’s top addons are commercial as well, they come with professional support, which more than makes up for the initial cost outset when you run into a bind along the way. ExpressionEngine allows you to work with your content in an entirely different way than other content management systems, completely separating it from the design, and this has led to a very active and dedicated fan-base.

With the power and flexibility of a complex and mature tool, such as ExpressionEngine, comes the challenge of working efficiently. In a wide-open playing field, one must set his or her own rules and standards, so that it’s easy to go back to a site you worked on several months ago and still know how it works. This has been the topic of sessions at the EECI conferences, such this one by Leevi Graham.

It’s in this area also, that I’ve found books such as Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 immensely helpful. Murphy’s new book is a good choice for the beginning ExpressionEngine user. It covers all the basics for a user who needs a little hand-holding. I appreciate that it also goes beyond the basics, with a chapter about implementing ExpressionEngine’s powerful membership features, both for control panel administration, and front-end site membership.

As any developer familiar with ExpressionEngine will tell you, one of the greatest features of the tool is its ability to be extended through add-ons. There’s a huge library of them available at Devot:ee, the ExpressionEngine community site, and it becomes a vital part of the development workflow to find appropriate add-ons for a given project. The end of the book includes an overview of several popular ExpressionEngine add-ons, which is fantastic. It’s extremely important to get a firm grasp of the available add-ons before really digging into ExpressionEngine.

While this book certainly isn’t the one for you if you’re already a seasoned ExpressionEngine user, I think any new user will find its contents valuable as they begin using the tool.

I had been testing MojoMotor along with several other developers in the beta program and got a head start into working with the code. As a result Zack Kitzmiller and I set off on a path to build several much-needed addons for the new CMS. Along the way, we also built a really cool little site to show them off and sell them, as well as help to sell third-party addons from other developers. In the future we’ll also be adding third-party packaged themes for MojoMotor users.

So, with that, I’m happy to introduce MojoAddons.com.

If you’re trying out MojoAddons and using it for a project, I think you’ll find our addons are a great fit for making MojoMotor just a bit more powerful.

It was a pretty quick little project to build the shortener a few weeks ago, and updating WordPress to use it was really easy too. I really should post the code somewhere.

Now, if Tweetie would just hurry up and release an update to the Mac client that includes custom shorteners like the iPhone client does.

We’re currently working on a new podcast called The Fuel Podcast, specifically focused on the CodeIgniter community, but covering a broad array of web development topics that CodeIgniter and non-CodeIgniter developers all will be interested in.

We recorded our first episode last week, and Jamie’s currently working fervently to get our site up and running, so we can open The Fuel Podcast up to the world.

I’ll update when we’ve got something to show for our labors. It’ll certainly be an entertaining experience for all who chose to listen. Our sarcastic, slightly competitive and general nerdy humor will keep you on your toes while you hear us comment on the latest and greatest on the Web.

If you follow my Tweets at all, you’ve probably read that in late November, I’ll be traveling to the U.K. to join the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow, prince of PHP, at his first Cambridge Geek Day conference.

You may also know, that I’ve built a basic prototype of an application called hashtag.it, which seeks to become a single source for meta information about hashtags used on Twitter.

One thing I’ve noticed at conferences is that session or conference hashtags are not standardized. Well, duh. That’s the beauty of the hashtag, it’s a completely community-driven piece of meta data. That’s all fine and good, but with the growing number of Twitter users, relevance is being lost. The goal of hashtag.it is to increase the relevance of Tweets to users by publicizing information about hashtags that users are using.

In a bit of a publicity stunt, I’ve offered to build an application for Cambridge Geek Day that helps attendees to use hashtags to make their Tweets during the conference more useful to other attendees and others interested in the event.

So, I’m building Cambridge Geek Day Connect. Basically, it’s an application that maintains a small cache of Tweets that contain specific hashtags that can be configured on the fly.

On the client side, jQuery is used to poll the caching server. As I’ve begun to build out the application, I’ve had to wonder what will happen with approximately 300 attendees fire up Connect, and requests begin to hit my server at a rapid clip. Will it crash? I hope not. At the same time, I wondered, what if a new hashtag comes into use after the event starts, and I want to make sure all the conference attendees have access to it?

The result, is a bit of a client-server setup. It’s nothing monumental, really. Configuration information is simply passed as part of each of the API’s response to the client. Configuration changes can be made to speed up or slow down the refresh of data from the client or update the hashtag filter options in the clients menu.

I’m sure it’s been done before. But I still must say, it’s pretty cool to see these configuration changes take place, being pushed out from the server to the clients.

I’ve now added the feed of What the Trend into Hashtag.it. Any hashtags that are found on the What the Trend site with a definition will be automatically imported into Hashtag.it.

Hopefully this will help jumpstart usage of the site by prepopulating it with some data.

Also, in the process of adding that functionality, we had a bit of a flub. We lost all the data that was loaded prior to last week. Luckily, it was only about 40 tags.

So, if you had previously added any hashtags to Hashtag.it, please add them again, and continue to add them going forward to help build up a collective database of hashtag definitions.

All for now.

A few months ago I quickly built a web site on a whim to store people’s definitions of hashtags from Twitter. The idea came from the huge number of hashtags I see flying by on my Twitter feed everyday. Many are common ones, but many are not. I found myself trying to figure out what they meant, and consequently, I thought maybe it’d be a good idea to try and capture the intent of each hashtag in a database somewhere.

So in a matter of hours I had a fully ajaxified and gracefully-degrading simple site that did just that. It’s called hashtag.it. (And let me tell you, getting a .it domain was a pain.)

It’s been up and running for a few months, and now I’m hoping to focus a little more of my attention to it once again.

Tonight I implemented my first major change to the code.

One of the major problems with launching a site of this nature is that it doesn’t really become useful until it’s full of data, and paradoxically, it doesn’t get full of data until people use it. What to do.. what to do?

Well, just last week Twitter updated their homepage, and as I diddled around with it I noticed that the trending hashtags listed on their homepage had definitions, which I later found out were sourced by a site called What the Trend. My heart sunk at first, thinking that maybe I’d missed the boat again in getting a cool site out the door and on the road to success. I looked around the site a little. It’s basically a site, somewhat similar to hashtag.it, except it deals exclusively with Twitter trends, be they hashtags or not.

Upon doing a little more digging, I found the What the Trend API. DING DING DING! I contacted the developer and found him amenable to my idea for using his API, which is great.

So now, all hashtags that appear on What the Trend will be directly imported into hashtag.it.

I’m hoping that over the next few days and weeks a large backlog of data can be stored and hashtag.it can actually become a useful resource for Twitter users.

That all sounds pretty nerdy, I’m sure. But I’m excited about it, and you should be too.

If you’re a Twitter user, please log onto hashtag.it and help me out by adding any hashtags you use in your Tweets. Also follow @hashtagit on Twitter to get the latest updates to the site. By adding tags, you’ll get yourself a little publicity too, as each definition links back to the URL you provide.

My experience so far has been pretty cool. For about a week I added CodeIgniter as a keyword, amongst some other nerdy web keywords. My Twitter account pretty much immediately started getting flooded with new followees.

It was exciting to see the number of CodeIgniter users out there, that I can now connect with. At the same time, the mass add-age of people was a bit overwhelming, and I eventually conceeded to remove many of the keywords from my Twollow settings.

It seems now they’ve added some new features, which I have yet to twy out, but, I hope that being able to monitor the Twittersphere for keywords will become more fun and useful without auto-follow activated.

My favorite scenario from the article on social network de-friending stories:

9. Don’t use my personal life as leverage in business negotiations

Doug Cone works hard and plays hard. After getting a little behind on a project, Doug’s colleague took advantage of their social networking friendship at work by using Doug’s posted Facebook photos of his weekend rafting adventures. In team meetings, his jealous colleague would complain, “…and you are sending pictures having fun in rivers with a bunch of girls.” Now de-friended, the colleague doesn’t seem so distracted by Doug’s weekend adventures.

Check out the full post on Mashable: 12 Great Tales of De-Friending