2006 Nov 11 - Sat

Apache Rewrite

After taking a look at Google's Webmaster Tools over a few days, I have come to the conclusion that Google doesn't crawl cgi-bin type things. So David Wheeler's rewrite page that I had come across a while back finally makes sense. The page url's need to be modifed to turn things into a seemingly standard directory structure.

Here is my version of a section of the Apache configuration file to handle the rewrites found anywhere within my /blog subdirectory:

  RewriteLogLevel 0
  RewriteLog /var/log/httpd/rewrite.log

<Directory "/var/www/html/blog">
  AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
  Options +ExecCGI
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>

The first two lines helped figure out why the rewrites weren't working. By setting RewritelogLevel to a non-zero value, of which I used a value of 4, log statements are written to the directory indicated by RewriteLog. It turned out that my rewrite rule becomes '^(.*)$' rather than Wheeler's '^/(.*)$'.

This only required one configuration change in the blosxom.cgi file:

$url = "http://www.oneunified.net/blog/";