The main page just got a new thing: a list of recent releases. Like the body of the main page, this is powered by WordPress, listing posts in the new Releases category. I’ve been thinking for a while that the main page was lacking something. This should help not only by providing convenient download links, but also giving visitors a better idea of what goes on here.
Of course, implementing the releases list meant doing some more monkeying around with PHP. One odd bug was that the last three items weren’t showing their download links, and I had to add an extra call to get_post_custom() just to wake it up and jog whatever caching was going on.
There was another problem which actually would have started a couple of days ago, but I didn’t notice it until I was testing this out. It started with my noticing some requests in my logs for uncommonplace.com/index.html, which gets a 404 error because the main page is index.php. So I set up a redirect from index.html to uncommonplace.com/, assuming that would automatically go to the PHP file like normal.
That turned out not to work so well. It turns out that when the server tries to figure out which file uncommonplace.com/ refers to, the first thing it tries is index.html… including redirects. So it would get caught in a loop.
The confusing thing there was that Firefox was giving me a 403 (access denied) error. On my site, a 403 usually only happens for one of two reasons: 1) you’ve linked to an image on my site without permission, or 2) your address is banned for spamming my blog. Finally I trired Safari, and it gave me the correct error: too many redirects.
I finally created an index.html file that forwards specifically to index.php. I could have done that with a server redirect too, but this will help remind me of these issues.
Next step: upgrade to WordPress 2. Then maybe convert all my pages to be managed by WordPress so I can take advantage of its template features and eliminate all the repetetive HTML in my pages. But that would require setting up a lot more redirects.
