How or why?

Those are the questions still dogging me over this Expression Engine URL business.

I can’t ascertain why EE has stopped behaving on my site and other sites on this Media Temple account, the same one I should note, hosting Mr. Domanico. This person, who at this point has what I can only describe as technological Stockholm syndrome, has somehow evaded this curse.

Further, and I ask you directly EE, how can you receive the perfectly reasonable request of www.jakemauer.com and serve http://jakemauer.com/jakemauer.com/html/index.php?/http://jakemauer.com/jakemauer.com/html/ as your response? I asked for a hamburger and you gave me a party sub made out of toothpicks and mayonnaise.

This window into insanity only occurs if I remove my recently duct-taped htaccess file, something I won’t inflict on you the reader because I know that would only result in the harshest of gazes, which is to say, no gaze at all.

The weirdest part in all of this as that at some point overnight, EE healed itself partially, allowing me to log into the admin interface without using the specific url. To this I can only say, “???????”

Honestly Expression Engine, I don’t mind that you require your modrewrite woobie, but at least explain to me why I should continue let you suck your thumb when there are perfectly mature alternatives.

It has just occurred to me that my life is currently boring.

Look at this shot

From The Sting:

Now look at my nerdiness!

I want to mention that although the content of this post took me 5 minutes to put together, Expression Engine decided to be a huge jerk about a week ago and stop redirecting certain URL strings, which made posting this take 3 hours. I still haven’t figured it out, which is especially frustrating since domanico.net seems to redirecting URL’s fine. (By redirecting fine I mean a URL like http://domanico.net?URL=http://google.com works fine.)

It turned from minor annoyance into a bigger problem when it prevented Windows Live Writer from working properly.

Digging around I found that adding the following line to my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(ACT=.*)$ [NC]

fixes Live Writer and adding this fixes my URL redirect problem:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(URL=.*)$ [NC]

So that my redirect block ends up looking like this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(ACT=.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(URL=.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/({ee:template_groups}|members|P[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

I’m still trying to get my admin panel redirect to work properly. I’ll update when I do.