Keyboard Face

It appears I was a little quick to talk about how easy it was to install this on a Windows server. 3 hours later!

WordPress was really written to take advantage of all the benefits of Apache. It uses a feature of Apache called mod_rewrite to make urls like this “site.com/index.php?year=2004&monthnum=07&day=07″ look like this “site.com/archives/2004/07/07/”. This is incredibly helpful with the search engines as they often don’t read URLs that have ?’s in them.

While you can use WordPress without this feature enabled, I feel it is extremely important. I was on the verge of uninstalling it when I finally found this article that solved my problems.

The problem was that Windows web server, IIS, doesn’t have an equivalent feature to mod_rewrite. In short, the solution suggested installing an add on to IIS called ISAPI_Rewrite . You can download the lite (freeware) version of it from here.

Rather than quote everything that I did, this article explains it very well.

For the past 2 weeks or so, I’ve been determined to create a blog about my travails in learning .NET. Well, I shouldn’t exactly say travails, but definitely, my trials. I searched and searched for the best blog software written in .NET.

See I was convinced that it just would not go to have a blog about .NET using some other platform. I tried installing CommunityServer - ran into several problems. First of which was that it didn’t like .NET 2.0. Second of which I wanted just a blog. Their photo gallery and forums were great, but I didn’t want to go there.

Anyway, I finally broke down and installed WordPress on my machine. Amazingly it only took about 5 minutes to install like that tutorial said. I happened to have PHP and MySQL already installed on my Windows 2003 machine. That made it significantly easier, but still.