mysiteonline™

I spent more than half the day today (24 hour day) thinking and trying to find a way to get a mod_rewrite call to work properly. I felt so dumb, retarded, and plain uneducated in my attempts. I left work a little bit early so I could concentrate (no distractions, no phone calls, no "how do I send an attachment", no nothing). Even after that, I kept running into a stumbling roadblock. My friend was trying his hardest to help me out (no idea why other than possibly a sheer curiosity - it's now almost 1:00am).

What I wanted to do:
http://example.com/contacts/form/recipients/bKozlowski/
...transformed to...
http://example.com/contacts/form/index.php?contact=bkozlowski

Sounds easy, right? Yeah, I thought so too when I first started. I tried every iteration of something that looked so darned simple and could only be done just so many ways... The eventual problem?

I needed to use: RewriteBase /
I have no idea what this directive does. I have no idea why my pattern now matches and works. The RewriteLog really wasn't helpful at all except to tell me that it wasn't working...something I could have figured out without a log, obviously. Anyway, if anyone really cares, the following is the actual end result:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^/?(contact)/([A-Z_@\.]+)/$ contact/form/index\.php?$1=$2 [NC,PT,L]

I both love and loathe mod_rewrite.

(Special thanks to the people over at SitePoint Forums for their immediate response!)

For the new website I've been developing and finishing up some "final touches" on the design to make the experience just a little bit better (before I can delve into the out-dated content after launch), one of the last things that was needed was to speed up the efficiency and download of assets - this included CSS and JavaScript files for the most part. I made the sIFR flash files as small as possible and my PNG images were compressed (and fixed for IE color rendering) using PNGGauntlet (which uses PNGOut). Until I can figure out ETags, a proper time for an Expires header, and GZip to work on CSS/JS files on our hosted server, this should suffice. It loads amazingly quick on my iPod Touch. ;)