So that happened. Apparently taking my blogs offline so that I can fulfill some nerdy desire to have them installed in a very specific fashion for rational reason other than my own whims does not actually guarantee that anything will be accomplished. This is reminiscent of way back when I switched domain names and swore I wouldn’t write anything until the redesign was complete. A month later the transfer took place sans promised theme. At least this time more was accomplished… I guess.
As intended from the start, this blog is my major – perhaps only – outlet for creative endeavors. Shutting down for too long depresses me a little. Coupled with the torrent of e-mails inundating me with demands to return my content to the world as soon as possible, it became necessary for me to either figure out my way or switch to anyway that would work. What follows is an incredibly boring discussion regarding the technicalities of blog maintenance.
When WordPress 3.0 came out recently, my excitement level hit an all time high… in relation to other excitement levels recorded at WordPress releases. You see, this one included multisite! Finally I would only need a single installation to cover all 2 of my blogs! Alright, that may not be a big deal, but I dream big when it comes to websites no one but my sisters care about… plus my other site. The truth is I viewed it as a way to get more active by utilizing a single interface, and possibly open myself up to other projects. So what was the problem? Why didn’t I just upgrade and move on?
Way back in the early days of WordPress I had a single site that was sitting on my home server. All of the files sat in the main directory and it looked like a mess, but it worked so who cared? Eventually they made it possible to keep the bulk of the files in a subdirectory and only have an index.php and .htaccess file in the main directory. This made it easier for nitpicky idiots like me to keep software running in different parts of the website separate. It also made backing up and upgrading (before the automated systems in place) a breeze. It also worked well with my Site5 multisite plan which had everything not thomnottom.com as a subdirectory of thomnottom.com. It kind of looked like this:
public_html /_domain1 /_domain2 /_domain3 /_subdomain /wordpress -> all of my precious WP files in here .htaccess index.php
Awesome, I know! But now multisite won’t play that way. It requires the installed directory and website to match. After debating moving my blog to a subdomain itself (blog.thomnottom.com? hmm, that actually sounds catchy now) I searched high and low for any kind of guides. Eventually some forum posts directed me to ideas of how to put the domain in a subdirectory and hide it via .htaccess. So I did. And it worked. So I reinstalled WordPress and imported my old site. And it worked. So I enabled multisite. And it worked. So I logged in… wait… it didn’t work.
For some reason it was botching the login process. Many more days of poking around Google and forums and whatnot led me nowhere. But a funny thing happened on the way to giving up. I realized that Site5 did not limit any of my other domain from being in directories above public_html. Why not just move everything else? So I did. And it worked. So I… you get the picture. Or else I can paint you a word picture:
mydirectory /domain1 /domain2 /really are there more? /pretend another directory goes here /public_html -> lots of WordPress files here
Maybe things aren’t exactly as I wanted them. And maybe I’ll still move this to the blog subdirectory because I just can’t leave well enough alone. Regardless, it’s time to move on and get back to writing about boring crap rather than just researching it…