Category Archives: Permalinks

FeedWordPress making invalid RSS?

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As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using FeedWordpress to syndicate affiliate links.  I turned on the option to have the permalink to the affiliated articles to go straight to the affiliate link instead of the page (that may be bad for SEO, but one less click for visitors).

The problem was the RSS feed became invalid because of the affiliate link.  So I need to encode the link.  So on line 590 of feedwordpress.php, I changed

$uri = get_syndication_permalink();

to

$uri = esc_attr(get_syndication_permalink());

The esc_attr function is a built in WordPress function that converts certain characters to their HTML encoded equivalents. Such as “&” becomes “&”.

Everything seems to be working fine now.

Is “site” a reserved word?

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I have 2 WordPress installs on the same domain and server. Custom (pretty) permalinks worked on one, but not the other. Domain names have been changed to protect the innocent. 

I have:
http://www.mysite.com/site
which is in development. And
http://www.mysite.com/wordpress
which has been around for a while.

Both have the custom permalink setting of /%category%/%postname%/

/site gives me a 404 error.
/wordpress works fine.

Their .htaccess files are identical except that /wordpress’s says "wordpress" where /site’s says "site".

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /site/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /site/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

The server is a Deluxe Linux server on Godaddy.

I followed the standard method of waiting after setting up the permalinks on a Godaddy server. I waited for days and /site still did not work.

/wordpress did not have the custom permalinks on yet.  It started working immediately after switching. (I think there may have been an existing empty .htaccess file.)

So, same versions of WordPress, same Linux server, similar setup, no weird plugins, same .htaccess file, same database with different prefixes for the tables.

I have tried reinstalling /site using the built-in updater.  I even tried deleting the database tables and uploading a fresh install of WordPress.

Then I had the idea to rename the "site" folder thinking maybe "site" was a reserved word or something.  So I went into the General settings, changed the paths to http://www.mysite.com/web, saved changes, and used FTP to change the folder name from "site" to "web".

It worked.

Even the .htaccess file was automatically changed.

Just to be sure, I changed "web" back to "site" and the permalinks stopped working until I changed it back to "web".

Does anyone have any insight?  Is this a WordPress, Apache, or a Godaddy thing?

Pretty Permalinks with Godaddy Windows Hosting

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Want pretty permalinks in WordPress?  Who wouldn’t?

However, if you are hosting your WordPress blog on a Godaddy Windows server, you need to one extra step to make this happen:

Copy and paste the following into a text file, save as “web.config”, and upload to the root of your WordPress blog.  If you already have a web.config file, be careful to just copy  the <rewrite>…</rewrite> tags and everything between them then paste inbetween the <system.webserver>…</system.webserver> tags.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <rewrite>
         <rules>
            <rule name="Main Rule" stopProcessing="true">
               <match url=".*" />
               <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
                 <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
                 <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
               </conditions>
               <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
            </rule>
         </rules>
      </rewrite>
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

See the original info here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/466/enabling-pretty-permalinks-in-wordpress/

WordPress Pretty Permalink Tip

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If you have pretty permalinks turned on in WordPress and the permalink to one of your posts is not working, check the permalink for percentage signs (%).

What happened? If you composed your entry in Word or some other word processor, that program probably has an auto-correct feature that turns straight single (or apostrophe) and double quotes into curly quotes automatically (MS Word calls them smart quotes). Then you copied and pasted your title straight from the word processor to the title field of your blog. When you published the post, WordPress tried to convert the curly quotes to something more URL friendly, but not all web browsers and/or servers recogize that format.

Solution: The best thing to do is edit the permalink (either from clicking Quick Edit on the Edit Posts page or on the full edit page for that post, click the permalink edit button directly under the title field.  Then delete any % sign you see and the 2 characters after the % sign.  The new pretty permalink should work after that.