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Published on March 5th, 2008
It has been bugging me for months that my permalinks said very little about what they were linking to. Prior to today, my links looked like this:
http://www.barrettcreates.com/blog/?p=5
You know you want to click on that. I bet you are thinking right now, “What will I find if I click on that link?” Are you brave enough to find out? It could be anything really…
I am happy to report that now my links look like this:
http://www.barrettcreates.com/blog/barrettcreatescom-gets-a-new-look/
In case you were too afraid to explore the first link, both point to the same article. Is it not nice that the second one actually tells you what the link is about? I have always been the type of person that looks at the bottom left corner of my browser window before I click a link to see where it is going to take me. It has always been a pet peeve of mine when I cannot tell right away what I might find if I click it.
Therefore, this blog entry is to report/celebrate that my site no longer has those cryptic permalinks. It only took a lot of stress, crashing the entire blog and a cry for help with my web host to make it work. I would like to tell you that I am full of knowledge and you can turn to me for the answers if you would like to do the same for your blog. That is not the case here. Maybe somebody out there knows of an easy tutorial just for creating the .htaccess file necessary to make it all work and another tutorial for the proper way of adding it through an FTP client. I thought I had, but in the end none of it turned out to be very useful to me. Even the WordPress plugin I installed did not help me. It required permission to write to the .htaccess file. Does that not make you wonder how you can give it permission? “Yes, you have my permission. Now magically make it work for me.”
Karly, i don’t understand.
Why didn’t you go to wp-admin.php, choosed Options > Permalinks > Custum structure > enter: /%postname%/? Or was creating and the setting of permissions (chmod) of the .htaccess file a problem?
If you need help, mail me. Manuel
Manuel, Æstheticrew’s last blog post..DIY: Expressive Words
Posted on April 1st, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Manuel,
Actually, I did try exactly that, but it kept telling that it didn’t have permission to write to my .htaccess file or there was no file to write to. So, I had to create the .htaccess file–which is what caused my site to crash. It is all fixed now, but if you know of a good tutorial out there that can help others that encounter the same problem, I’d be very happy if you shared it.
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 at 9:26 am
Hmm, a tutorial for creating and chmodding .htaccess files? Guess there must be plenty of fish in the Google bowl, not?
Anyways, this is what i do when i set up a new WordPress installation (make sure you do that before you start to publish, otherwise all your links which are already spidered by Google etc. won’t work anymore):
Make sure your FTP programm shows hidden files (settings depend on your program, you’ll figure)
Create a file called htaccess (note: put no dot in front of it yet) in your wordpress directory
Right- or control click the htaccess file and change its chmod permission to 666
Change the filename of the htaccess file to .htaccess (now the dot came to play, yay)
Browse to your WordPress dashboard and find the permalink menu (under Options in versions below 2.5, under Settings since version 2.5)
Change the permalink structure how you fancy it
Or take a look at the Wordpress codex page regarding this matter, they might be better at explaining this stuff.
Manuel, Æstheticrew’s last blog post..DIY: Expressive Words
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 at 9:55 am
Oh, my ordered list is not displaying, boohoo
Well, guess you get the picture anyways 
Manuel, Æstheticrew’s last blog post..DIY: Expressive Words
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 at 9:56 am