Did I break it by adding .htaccess?

  • Hi, I am very much a newbieand I will so much appreciate whatever help anyone can offer…

    I was unable to access my website’s stats after installing WordPress (gave me a “not found” message since there was nothing in the WordPress database for directory /stats/), and I read on my web host’s (Dreamhost) support site that I might need to write
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
    to the “.htaccess” file. Apparently version 1.5 does not use .htaccess but I created a file titled .htaccess including only the above two lines and ftp’ed it to my main directory. I can access my stats now, but only the pain page and admin pages of my blog (https://www.goodponies.com) show up. Other pages give an error like “Not Found, The requested URL /category/available-for-sale/ was not found on this server., Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.” And to boot, “.htaccess” doesn’t actually show up in any of the FTP programs I have tried (Internet Explorer, an old version of WSFTP LE and a new version of FTP Surfer)–though a manual request to transfer .htaccess from the webserver to my computer seems to work, whereas it doesn’t work with made-up filenames. I tried transferring a blank .htaccess file, and that didn’t seem to change anything–I can still access my stats, and I still can’t access blog pages. I have tried manually creating a “DELE .htaccess” command in FTP Surfer and it told me it couldn’t find that file.

    I feel pretty foolish, can anyone explain to me what might have happened and what I might try to fix it? Again, I am not a sophisticated user of WordPress, FTP, or anything else. I’m fairly alarmed and worried!

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)

  • Webmasterworld has great lists of .htaccess rules like that, and they also have big wanrings that unless you know what you are doing, you should not mess with .htaccess – it’s a powerful tool.

    If you add something, and your site breaks, reverse what you did ?

    And before you do anything else, decide exactly what it is you are trying to acheive – it may then be doable.

    Yes, I’m perfectly aware of what I’m doing; I’m not looking for enormous amounts of traffic, especially not from search engines (there is a method to my madness, I promise, but it’ll take forever to explain). Quite simply, I don’t want people to come to my site via search engines or a couple of particular referring sites; I want my blog to stay marginally private. If anyone could help me figure out what I’m doing wrong (and yes, I removed the file when it wasn’t working), I’d really appreciate it.

    Try to access your site using telnet to find out exactly what is happening.

    The Dreamhost Wiki has a page specifically about this phenomenon (which I was also encountering).

    https://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Making_stats_accessible_with_htaccess

    I followed it, and it fixed my problems without breaking my site. Enjoy!

    Cool! That wiki entry fixed it for me too!

Viewing 5 replies - 16 through 20 (of 20 total)
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