This weekend I’ve re-started on a website that I was meant to have finished ages ago. Now that I have all of those extra minutes per day having extracted myself from Facebook’s clutches, I’ve resolved to get it finished and get it finished I shall.

Rather than re-inventing wheels, like I did with my own website, I’ve opted to build this site using Textpattern. So far it seems pretty straightforward. This is ideal as I don’t intend to maintain the new website (another good reason not to hand-crafting my own Perl, PHP or Python).

One thing that did take a while to get working, however, is getting ‘Clean URLs’, those without question marks and ampersands all over the place, to work. Thankfully like so many things, this is a solved problem. For future reference, the solution was easy for the virtual host on my MacBook Pro, with just one AllowOverride line needed in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf…

<Directory "/path/to/website">
    Order Deny,Allow 
    Allow from all 
    AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>

Incidentally, I’m keeping both /path/to/website and /private/etc/apache2 under source control with Git, as I am doing with pretty much everything I do these days. Git is version control done correctly. Thank you, Linus!