Jason Lancaster

I spent about an hour yesterday looking up URL’s on my site that have been archived or moved over the years and redirecting them via .htaccess to the appropriate sections. The problem was, I could only get proxy rules to work within Wordpress.

I kept trying the following, which I assumed would work after reading the apache mod_rewrite documentation:

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [R=301,L]

I finally gave up and went with a proxy rule that worked fine, but wasn’t exactly what I wanted (because the url didn’t get changed — ie, proxy).

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [P]

Just a second ago though, I thought to myself, “I wonder if the order of the flags plays a role.” And of course, it does… though I can’t find any documentation to support this.

So if you’re driven nuts trying to create a custom rewrite rule which won’t work for you, remember that order matters. Give the rule the last flag first, then the redirect flag.

RewriteRule ^gallery/$ /photos/ [L,R=301]

I suppose that might make a lot of sense to mod_rewrite veterans but not for me. I’m very glad I figured this out and hope this post can help someone (or me again) in the future.

I’ve been a bit bothered recently by something: people calling themselves web designers when all they do is create designs for weblogs. Not that the particular process of creating a design for a weblog isn’t designing — I don’t argue that it is design. But people who have never created a site for a corporation, or a product, or anything outside of the realm of blogs just don’t seem like real designers to me. It’s kind of like the whole late 90’s thing where anyone with notepad and an ftp client somehow became a “web designer”. Or anyone without a job after the tech boom became a “consultant.”

All of this then over-saturates the market. Not only do I question their design concepts and portfolio, but I ask if they are legitimate or not. Legitimate being a certain set of rules which may or may not be flexible, but in the end allow me to make a snap decision on the person I’m looking at because I can’t stand wasting my time on a fake.

I think there’s something inherently wrong with a snap decision based on that criteria. Blogs are important and invaluable in today’s web world. They’re the popular newcomer. Both hip and cool. I understand all this yet can’t wrap my head beyond it. It simply comes down to a, “They only design blogs. Next.”

And maybe that’s OK for corporate sites and similar situations where you don’t see what you need conceptualized in their portfolio. But maybe not. Some of these people have great designs, just nothing beyond the weblog medium. Being progressive is a good thing. I absolutely want a progressive designer to design for me.

I can’t be the only person out there that does this. The real question is, is it bad practice? Or is it the designers fault for not having a more well-rounded portfolio?

I won’t be buying a new iPhone tomorrow for a variety of reasons. I thought it might be important to note them now and perhaps see how my viewpoint changes over time.

While I’m quite excited about the iTunes App Store and real software for the iPhone, it’ll all run just fine on mine. The only piece of software that will convince me to go iPhone 3G will be a working GPS application. Read: An actual real-life GPS application like you’d have in your car.

I figure that one is quite a ways off, if at all even possible. I’ll leave that little piece of wizardry to Garmin or another big player but I bet it would be one of the most, if not THE most popular application for the iPhone.

Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything new. Edge speeds hardly ever bother me. Most of the time I have a wifi signal. What’s the point in upgrading if you don’t get an upgrade?