Why are people am I so angry? Something happened not half an hour ago that should probably scare me. I heard a noise outside the window of the room where I was trying in vain to do a bit of my dissertation (now due in 4 weeks; shite!) and went out to see what it was. I could see a dark figure walking away from my door with my wheelie bin, which had been parked beside it.
Microsoft tell you that it’s not possible to run IIS, the Windows Web Server, on Windows XP Home Edition (see note 1). In previous versions of Windows, the home versions (Windows 98, ME etc) included something called Personal Web Server, which was a bit like a cut down version of IIS. Imagine my horror when I had to create a website using ASP (not my choice, I’m a PHP kinda nerd.) only to find that my shiny new operating system couldn’t even do something my mum and dad’s old Windows 98 box could do.
Having paid seventy odd pounds for this ‘upgrade’ I was a bit miffed that Microsoft had discontinued PWS. Then, after a bit of Googling, I discovered Win XP Home could run a web server after all – and IIS at that. As a bit of a bonus, you can also access the Windows XP Pro / Windows 2000 style advanced security settings (see note 2). Here’s how it’s done.
I’ve just spent the guts of an hour fannying about no various websites trying to figure out why I was getting an HTTP 404 (File not found) error when trying to update the settings on Wordpress to make it ping different services. I hunted through the file being called, ie options.php, to no avail. I Googled the problem and found this. The guy who zipped a new options.php file had taken it offline (more 404!!) and the other solution posted there didn’t work. Still a 404. Then I read it might be something to do with Apache and mod_security, so spent a minute or two pondering contacting my web hosts.
Then it came: my Eureka moment. After some messing about I noticed it didn’t happen on the “General Options” page (options-general.php), only on the “Writing Options” page (options-writing.php). I then tried updating the settings without changing any of them and … it worked!! Crazy!
It didn’t take long from then to figure out that the problem wasn’t with the Wordpress setup, but with one of the URLs I was trying to get it to ping. Apparently Wordpress doesn’t like Pinging the services at NorthernIrishBlogs.com, BritishBlogs.co.uk or IrishBlogs.ie
Wordpress doesn’t seem to want to work with any URI that has a “.” in it, so that rules out any that point to files (with extensions) rather than directories (in fact, I just tried to save this post after inserting an example URL and was given a similar 404. I then went into panic when I hit ‘back’ on the browser to see an empty text area where my post used to be! Thank goodness for auto save). Presumably WP is trying to pingback the URL because it was in my post, and is having problems but I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to have a problem with normal URLs, extension or not. Bizarre!
To be continued…