Two steps forward and one step back

The good news is that you end up one step further forward than you started, so you have to take heart in that. Bit of a theme for yesterday and today:

  • Yesterday J and I started catching up with the World Cup scores and putting them on our wall chart. Then by the power of maths we started to work out who had qualified from the group stages (yes, we were behind). This went really well, although we ran out of time after two groups. I think that J got a lot out of it as he saw there was a point to doing the sums. Tonight when I tried to do a bit more he was too tired after the afternoon’s bouncing, so we managed one more group with some effort. If I take a step back from the extra effort required, he’s still done maths more willingly than he has for a while.

  • After Jax and Kath pointed out Sage to me, I switched to it rather than using Bloglines to keep track of my RSS feeds. I love the auto-discovery thing, and the fact that it just works. One thing I miss from Bloglines is being able to tell it to hide feeds with nothing new on them.

  • The final forward/back (then forward again) was with the site. Ho hum. I expect I’ll get it just so eventually. I’d found out what the real problem was – when you turn on nice permalinks in WordPress (that don’t have question marks and random numbers in) WordPress updates the .htaccess files behind your site for you to tell Apache (the web server) to use one of its groovy features (mod_rewrite) to turn ugly permalinks into spiffy ones. Strangely it assumes that part of the turn-on-grooviness instructions are already there and doesn’t bother adding them.

    If you have an incomplete set of instructions Apache gets confused and your site disappears. Having sussed all this out, I fiddled with the site this morning before work and turned it all on and checked I could see the site. Hurrah! Nice permalinks! When I came to blog at lunchtime I discovered I couldn’t – same problem as before, but this time limited to just the WordPress admin stuff. I then realised that the admin stuff lives in its own directory on the server, which has its own .htaccess file, and I hadn’t added the missing bit of the instruction to that one (just to the main one for people reading the blog). I couldn’t do anything about it as I can only fettle at home. I’ve now fixed it all, and it’s all lovely and shiny, at least until I try to do the next bit of cleverness.