El Cuchitril

From last weekend our blog lacobachab where not updating their feed, as I removed and updated wp-cache info, most probably I removed redundant entries on .htaccess, BUT looks like removed the correct ones and left the wrong ones, tip if you don’t know if your .htaccess mod_rewrite rules are OK, is safe to rm the file, go to Settings / Permalink and just save that recreates the rules.

from

$more lacobachab/.htaccess
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /lacobachab/index.php [L]

# END WordPress

to

$ rm lacobachab/.htaccess
$ more lacobachab/.htaccess
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /lacobachab/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /lacobachab/index.php [L]

# END WordPress

This caused a headache as from 15th we don’t get updates on a highly visited entry about our test on live streaming, bummer.

Also as when you don’t find the page you are searching for we use the follow a missing.html file that returns to you a meta tag with the http-equiv=»Refresh» content=»0; URL=http://blografia.net» sending you back to front page in case you get lost or mistype the url.

So you got to the front page instead of getting an ugly 404 or worse the confusing error that missing.html is missing and 404.

So the real problem was that we where getting missing.html instead of php generated feed or this:

$ curl -i blografia.net/lacobachab/feed
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:33:26 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:49:36 GMT
ETag: "9c-4deece70c017a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 156
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=http://blografia.net" />Blografia

Now fixing the problem

$ curl -I blografia.net/lacobachab/feed/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:57:51 GMT
Server: Apache
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://blografia.net/lacobachab/xmlrpc.php
ETag: "c4b42b6a4db055659fba42921b7b9ae8"
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8

Notice the change from i to I to not get all the code but header… yeah, troubleshooting is time consuming but its better than just reinstalling to try to fix something that now I’m aware its really easy to spot.