OK, I think I have it sorted out… I installed WordPress on astroengine.com so I could make life easier for me to write and organize articles – afterall, the previous version was always a “work in progress” and never became a serious science blog. I gained some satisfaction from building the site from the ground up, including custom RSS feeds, custom functions, creating complex gallery systems… all in all the “Astroengine Project” consumed months of development time. And yet, I was never satisfied.
I have worked with online blogs for a few years now, including Movable Type and WordPress, but always wanted to know what was going on “under the hood” (one of the reasons for creating my own). So I decided to take the plunge and install WordPress.
All hell broke loose!
First, I had to find a home for my personal site (after all, I wasn’t going to delete that beast!). I own the www.eeron.com domain name, so I wanted to use that (“Eeron” being my school nickname). After much wrestling with .htaccess files, I finally managed get Eeron.com to work. Great!
Not content with the default WordPress installation, of course I had to fiddle. Then it broke. I pulled at the code and re-wrote the access settings… Still broke. Astroengine.com, plus a few articles, fell offline and I spent ten hours chasing my tail and getting nowhere. Determined to kickstart the system, I went back to the beginning and hunted for the problem. Great, a missing WordPress installation file! Replaced, I fired it back up. Tadaaa! Fixed. Nice.
But what of the 404 error file? The damned custom 404 error page would show in Firefox, but Internet Explorer kicked up its generic 404 Page Not Found page. Now this was not an easy solution to fix, as it seems there is some conflict with the GoDaddy server settings (in my opinion – they didn’t admit to any such problem). So, back to the .htaccess file fun. To be honest, I’m still not sure where the problem is, but after turning off some permalink settings, it seemed to rejuvanate the system and it worked once more. So my answer to this to this problem is to turn all permalink settings to default.
So, after a few hiccups, I think astroengine.com is back in business!
astroengine.com 