Configuring WordPress For This Site
June 18th, 2008 by ComputerBob
This is the third day of my continuing saga of transitioning my daily Journal from having to be manually updated in XHTML and CSS files every day, to maintaining it through the use of a dedicated blogging tool.
Two days ago, I began to use this web site’s SMF forum as a surrogate blogging tool. Then, yesterday, I decided to try to install and use WordPress instead.
As I had predicted in yesterday’s Journal entry, installing WordPress was a breeze. I only ran into one problem. To prevent search engines from diluting the popularity of this site’s pages by spidering both the “computerbob . com…” and “www . computerbob .com…. version of each page, this site’s .htaccess file automatically adds “www.” to any URL that doesn’t already have it. Basically, if any visitor (or search engine) tries to go to
“computerbob . com/somewebpage” the .htaccess file automatically sends them to
“www . computerbob . com/somewebpage“
That turned out to be a problem because, by default, WordPress installed itself onto “computerbob . com” instead of “www . computerbob . com” — so when I tried to go to my WordPress Admin panel (at “computerbob . com/…”) the .htaccess file sent me to “www . computerbob.com/…” which (as far as WordPress is concerned) didn’t exist.
Here’s how I solved the problem:
- I edited this site’s .htaccess file to comment-out the 2 lines that do the automatic redirects.
- I logged into my WordPress default Admin panel at computerbob . com/…
- I clicked on “Settings.”
- I edited “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Blog Address (URL)” to add “www.” to each of them.
- I edited this site’s .htaccess file again, to un-comment the 2 lines that do the automatic redirects.
- I logged into my WordPress Admin panel at “www . computerbob . com/…”
I know you’re wondering why I put spaces in those example URLs above. It’s because I couldn’t find any other way to type them without my SMF forum automatically turning them into hyperlinks. It worked to type them as “code” snippets, so they appeared in separate boxes from the rest of each sentence that they are in, but doing that broke the “numbered list” that they’re in, so I left them in the numbered lists but spaced them out, to prevent them from being turned into hyperlinks.
Anyway, WordPress is installed, but my job has suddenly grown MUCH larger than I had anticipated. That’s because I forgot that while I’m switching this Journal to WordPress, I ALSO want to switch this entire web site to a “fixed-width” design, to give me much more control over how it displays.
So now I’m neck-deep in CSS layout sites, looking for a simple, browser-friendly, W3C-valid, fixed-width, multi-column layout that will work for WordPress as well as for all of the non-WordPress sections of this web site. The good news is that there about a hundred choices. That’s also the bad news.
More fun to come! Stay tuned!
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Coding, Internet, Personal, Software, Web Development