gregorg

wow, it actually works. thanks!

thanks, I figured as long as the process was general and possibly future-relevant for others, I'd keep asking here. If I have specific problems with my server, I'll take'em to the help desk.

Hmm. So far, the only thing that I'm seeing is that, yes, I can screw up my account with an .htaccess file. I've tried creating files with both sets of commands above [as is, except I removed the # on the RewriteEngine On line] which textedit sees as rtf files, but which I place as text using ftp and name ., no extension, and which show up as 'documents'. after refreshing the ftp window, the file doesn't show up, but as long as it's there, I get 500 error messages trying to load any pages or click through to any php or html links. The error msg also says there was an error loading the error document, which I interpret as a problem loading the 404.shtml page, the only html-formatted page on the site at the moment. If I replace .htaccess with a blank file, then delete it from my ftp window while I can still see it, everything's back to normal [i.e., all my files converted fine to php, but no redirect/rewrites and thousands of dead links.] Is there something in my .htaccess creation or uploading process that's just plain wrong? Or is there something in my settings/site that I should open a ticket for? thanks,

hm, so will it be ok if all my .htaccess has in it is: #RewriteEngine on RedirectMatch (.*)\.html$ http://mysite.com$1.php Or is there a bunch of default stuff you need to cover in an .htaccess file IF you're going to have one? [none of the .htaccess documentation I've seen on the web discusses these big, existential questions...]

Sweet, thanks. I think for now, I'll stick with the one line that makes sense, and just add a searchbox to my 404 page while I look around for an example of a site that does what I'm imagining. crawl walk run, etc. of course the "you can mess up your account" reminder has nothing to do it

I'm interested in converting my MT3.2 blog output files from html to php, and since the blog is old (2+ yrs) and med. sized (2k posts), there are a lot of links, internal and on the web, to individual posts that I'd like to maintain. From what I understand, apache's mod_rewrite can do this, and dynamically rewrite an incoming URL request to change the .html extension to .php (which, I think, is all that I'll need, since the archive structure isn't changing.) 1) Is mod_rewrite something I have to request to be activated/installed on my (shared/reseller) server? 2) where is it, and where's .htacess, which I apparently need to edit? 3) a SixApart forum on converting MT to PHP [link here] includes this script: RedirectMatch (.*)\.shtml$ http://greengabbro.net$1.php which, if I understand correctly, should be altered to this, since my extensions are .html, not .shtml. Right? RedirectMatch (.*)\.html$ http://mysite.com$1.php does it matter that there's no www? I usually don't use it, but a lot of site readers/linkers do. thanks in advance, oh, and 4) Ideally, to catch dead links or links that have changed more than just *.php, I'd like to add something to my customized 404 page that parses an incoming URL and present links to both/either a close-matching URL or a related search result. I think this'd come a lot from google images searches, for example, where the referring url has google search terms in it, but where I'd like to serve up the image in context, not just hand it over raw/alone. Or is this another topic altogether?