funky clean URLs and permalinks
Permalinks/clean URLs at my site have been troublesome since I first looked into them. At the first moment I was running this site on NetBSD and somehow on that configuration, nothing worked fine besides the messy URLing (like /index.php?=messy) (which of course had nothing to do with running on NetBSD, it just happened to not work…). Next to that I was way too happy with my upgrade from a 180MHz R5000 to a 1200MHz Athlon Thunderbird back then, so I had enough other things to play with…
Anyways, later on, I moved this site to Gentoo on my current server and somehow, the clean url-ing started to work only the title-part of the clean-url wouldn’t ‘render’ at all and I had no clue where to look. After some upgrades and reconfigurations for other reasons, the title-part started to work also, but still not completely satisfactory…
it’s amazing what Google Images comes up with when you search for an appropriate image for ‘permalink’ *^_^*
This sunday-afternoon I decided I had enough of that and got to grips with permalinks *^_^*
...also because I don’t/didn’t want this thing to grow into some monster with permalinks being everything besides permanent…
So… what was the problem? Even though textpattern told me I enabled the “Permalink title-like-this (default is TitleLikeThis)” -option… I still got URLs like http://geektechnique.org/blog/640/Elsieneededafix
So the titles wouldn’t get dashes(hyphens) in the titles and it wouldn’t lowercase them also, whatever I did…
...so… after a looooong investigation (this took me all afternoon) where the bottleneck to this problem could be… I finally found it… it seemed the ‘internal script encoding’ in my php.ini was set to EUC-JP (japanese?) and when I changed that to UTF-8 (which my Apache-install likes much better…) things started to work… at least… on new articles… so after that I found myself in yet another MySQL-crashcourse in where to find the url_titles in my database and how to delete the contents of that, in such a way Textpattern would start to ‘render’ the clean urls again, and this time in a way how I liked to see them, lowercase and with hyphens…
So this is what I did (I googled several times for this problem, to no avail, so maybe I help someone else out with this, googling for the same…)
In my php.ini I changed mbstring.internal_encoding to UTF-8:
; internal/script encoding.
; Some encoding cannot work as internal encoding.
; (e.g. SJIS, BIG5, ISO-2022-*)
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
and I did the following on the MySQL-commandline…
mysql> connect textpattern;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> show columns from textpattern;
mysql> SELECT url_title FROM textpattern;
mysql> UPDATE textpattern SET url_title='';
mysql> SELECT url_title FROM textpattern;
and tada! empty url_titles!
(there’s quite some slack in the commands here… only the ‘connect’ and the ‘update’ commands with are necessary… I like to double-check everything (and did this first to my geektechnique-test-environment (yes! there is one! ;-)) before I did this to the live-database…)
So… permalinks now actually have a chance to become permanent this way :-)
Well, this must be one dull post… ;-)
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