Diarizing

Yesterday i spent many hours trying to fix a 302 loop with Pligg (a great piece of open source software to create a Digg clone site), so i’m gonna post here the (easy) solution, just in case someone else have same problem.

Installed Pligg and enabled search engine friendly URL (Pligg calls it URL Method 2), i had a loop of 302 redirects when i tried to visit users page.

Apache’s error log file said “Negotiation: discovered file(s) matching request: /path/to/vhost/domain.tld/htdocs/index.html (None could be negotiated).” and it should had tell me something, but i haven’t be able to look for the solution in the right place (Google is not always the best place…).

Apache’s access log file showed a bunch of 302 redirects. So, the problem was a loop of 302 redirects (and page wasn’t loaded, of course).

Where the problem was? I immediately thought to look in .htaccess file, but after i commented every single rewrite instruction i still had the problem. Then, i looked at Apache’s configuration to remember how virtual host are configured (i use VHCS on the server i installed Pligg).

At that point, something catched my eyes. In fact, vhosts have this line:

Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

In .htaccess file i had the line:

Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks

So, looking for explanation of every option in Apache documentation, i found out that MultiViews was the option giving problems to me (more info here).

And adding -MultiViews to the line above fixed the problem. So, just change

Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks

to

Options +Indexes +FollowSymlinks -MultiViews

if you have the same problem of 302 redirects loop.

I spent many hours to find it out, so i hope this post can save your time in case you have the same problem.

Should we report this as paid link or just sphinn it?

Running from Camera

A few weeks ago i’ve been in Rome for a meeting. Maybe one day i’ll talk about this meeting, since we discussed a very interesting project, but today i just want to give my link love to the apartment in Trastevere where i stayed.

Trastevere is great because it’s full of life and this apartment is located in a nice small street with a lot of pubs and restaurant.

And there’s even pizzeria Nerone, where you can eat my favourite kind of pizza: pizza with ‘nduja. Yum!

The apartment is very nice (pictures on that page tell you exactly what you will find) and if you need a place to stay in Rome, i really suggest to give it a try. However, i think other accomodations must be as good as the one i tried.

What’s that? A bug or a feature?

Do you know all issues you can have when doing SEO on multi language websites? Or, simply, when you have to do SEO for non english websites?

Don’t think it’s an easy work just because english is more competitive. You could damage your ranking if you don’t take care of language related issues.

I just found out (via Achille) Multilingual SEO Forums, a forum focused on multilanguage websites topic. If you need (or just want, uh) to do SEO on non english websites, keep it in mind.

Judah stumbled upon the open web analytics project and i installed Open Web Analytics as soon as i read his post.

I love open source software (i almost use only open source software). So, it’s been natural to download and install OWA. I just started with it, so there’s not too much i can tell about it at this time, but first impression is very good. Better than i expected.

Open Web Analytics (OWA) is an open source web analytics framework written in PHP. OWA was born out of the need for an open source framework that could be used to easily add web analytics features to web sites and applications. The OWA framework also comes with built-in support for popular web applications such as WordPress and MediaWiki. As a generic web analytics framework, OWA can be extended to track and analyze any web application.

I’m using OWA on a couple of wordpress blogs, but i’m going to try it as a standalone application (and i want to try it with OsCommerce, of course) as soon as i can. And you should do the same.

Link love is posting a link to sites or blogs, usually unsolicited, that you enjoy, admire, or find useful. (Blogossary)

Sometimes i want to write about something completely unrelated with main topics (search marketing, web analytics, open source, search engine optimization, …). “Link love” is where i can talk about a travel, a restaurant, and so on. And, of course, where i can link websites i think deserve my link. Link love.

If you are looking for a versatile mass mailing software, written in PHP and freely provided under the GPL, you should definitely try poMMo.

Spread it.