Last night I attended my first DCBlogs meetup in RFD in DC, thanks to an invite from Joe.  Apparently I picked a good first meeting because the turnout was quite high – hopefully something that will continue.  I met a quite a few interesting people and saw my first blog groupies, something I did not even know existed.  Rather than cheating and looking at the members page on meetup I will try to recall people’s details from memory……

• Harsh from spirkle.com (who gets extra credit for the lift back to Arlington)
• Jamy from Grateful Dating
• Brooks from Debatepedia
• Rick a.k.a I-66

After that my memory gets pretty hazy, probably due to alcohol – the tipple du jour was Magic Hat #9 both at the meetup and back in Arlington at Ragtime.  I do remember someone called Ross (can’t remember his last name or his blog), someone called Patrick (ditto) and Vanessa (who did not blog).  In any case it was a bit of fun and certainly nowhere near as scary as the last online related event I went to many years ago in Dublin which was IRC related…

Besides that, and partially inspired by meeting so many bloggers that do this thing properly, I finally fixed my blog.  For some time I have had to put a redirect in place to get WordPress to function correctly at the http://comerford.cc address, previously I had just used a symbolic link to achieve this and the effect was much cleaner.  A 302 redirect actually sends you to the http://comerford.cc/wordpress address whereas the the symbolic link keeps you in the original root.  Besides being annoying, this can also cause problems for search engines.

The redirection also breaks things like Technorati pings amongst others and so is basically a pain in the ass.  However, it worked well enough for me to procrastinate, so I left it.  Turns out that allowing symbolic links to PHP files is a security risk and so it was disabled by my hosting company – this was in a bulletin I received, but who reads those?

A quick lesson on the mod_rewrite Apache directive and I have now fixed the problem, and should probably have used that in the first place as it is more compatible with things like PHP includes and such – hooray for me!

Technorati Tags: dcblogs, meetup, Washington DC, RFD, apache, mod_rewrite, PHP, ragtime, blogs, technorati, 302, symbolic links

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