Technology Tales

Buying in Britain

Under this heading, I have collected my listings of places on the web where you can purchase computing, mobile telephony and photographic equipment. As per the title, these apply to the U.K. because I have yet to import anything from beyond the shores of the island where I am writing these words. While I cannot claim to have patronised all of the emporia that are listed, the hope is that there’s enough there to enable some price checking and sourcing of goods that otherwise may not have wide availability. You never know but they even might come in useful.

PC Builders

Refurbished Computers

More Computing Equipment

Mobile Phones

Photography Kit

As you might have guessed from the names, we are not just limiting ourselves to computers, phones and cameras but include the accessories too. In fact, since the explosion of mobile telephony and digital photography, a major crossover has development between formerly very separate business areas. The fact that many mobile phones carry the same processing power as desktop PC’s did not so many years over a decade ago rather forces the issue.

When film held sway, photography was a very analogue affair with most of the magic being made in the camera and in printing labs, including personal darkrooms. A scanner was an essential item for digitising any images. Film still lives on but the convenience of digital capture has won me over, particularly with its thrusting the processing back on my shoulders instead of paying someone else to do it. That costs time instead of money but the latter quantity is less plentiful this times. Just as my interest in desktop computing continues to persist into an age when everything is getting more and more mobile, the art of photography hasn’t been automated out of existence because it always has been the photographer that was the most important actor in the discipline.

Then, there’s the upsurge in mobile computing. While I may have been late to the game with my purchase of a BlackBerry and an Asus Eee PC in the last few months, it’s not unclear where things are going with the gadgets becoming more and more appealing. Now, it’s hard to believe that it was just under a decade ago when most mobile phones were for making and taking voice calls along with sending text messages. Yes, PDA’s were about but they didn’t seem to be as commonplace as smartphones are today. Still, it seems that mobile phone technology is going to continue evolving so it’ll be interesting to see where things go, especially with the advent of cloud computing.

With all of the changes that are in train, desktop computing is likely to continue in one form or another. We may be in the heart of a technological revolution brought on by mobile and cloud computing but there’s still something more productive about sitting at a desktop and working a machine with a mouse and keyboard. My hunch is that desktop computing is going to itself alter over the next few years with touchscreen monitors already becoming available. That development could get interesting if combined on a full specification laptop that rarely spends any time away from being plugged into a power socket.

All in all, it feels as if we are moving through a period of massive change in the world around us after a period of what felt like prolonged stability. Even in an economic downturn, it feels as if all hell has broken loose in the world of technology with old certainties being overthrown and it looks as if it is going to stay that way for a while. There may be a time of consolidation yet but the trick at the moment is control any temptations until we find any use for new shiny things that attract massive attention. Then, the listings that I have collected here might have a use.

One way to fix slow CyberGhost VPN connections on Windows 10

Due to a need to access websites with country blocking, I have decided to give CyberGhost a go and it also will come in handy when connecting devices to other Wi-Fi connections. What I have got is the three year subscription package and all went went well on the first day of use. However, things became unusable on the second and a reboot did not sort it.

The problem seemed to affect a phone running Android too and I even got to suspecting my router an broadband provider. Even terminating the subscription came to mind but it did not come to that. Instead, I did a bit more research and tried changing the maximum transition unit (MTU) for the connection to 1300 as suggested in a CyberGhost help article. Using the Control Panel meant that it was resetting to 1500 on my Windows 10 machine so I then turned to a command line based solution.

To do that, I started PowerShell in administrator mode from the context menu produced by right clicking on the Start Menu icon on the taskbar. Then, I entered the following command to see what connections I had and what the MTU settings were:

netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces

From looking through the Settings and Control Panel applications, I already had worked out what network interface belonged to the CyberGhost connection. Seeing that the MTU setting was 1500, I then issued a command like the following to change that to 1300.

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "<name of ethernet interface>" mtu=1300 store=persistent

Here, <name of ethernet interface> gets replace by the name of your connection and the string is quoted to avoid spaces in the name causing problems with executing the command. Once that second command had been run, the first one was issued again and the output checked to ensure that the MTU setting was as expected.

This was done when the VPN connection was inactive but it may work also with an active connection. After making the change, I again reconnected to the VPN and all has been as expected since then and I found a better connection for my Android phone too.

Tidying dynamic URL’s

A few years back, I came across a very nice article discussing how you would make a dynamic URL more palatable to a search engine and I made good use of its content for my online photo gallery. The premise was that URL’s that look like that below are no help to search engines indexing a website. Though this is received wisdom in some quarters, it doesn’t seem to have done much to stall the rise of WordPress as a blogging platform.

http://www.mywebsite.com/serversidescript.php?id=394

That said, WordPress does offer a friendlier URL display option too and you can see this in use on this blog; they look a little like the example URL that you see below, and the approach is equally valid for both Perl and PHP. I have been using the same approach for the Perl scripts powering my online phone gallery and now want to apply the same thinking to a gallery written in PHP:

http://www.mywebsite.com/serversidescript.pl/id/394

The way that both expressions work is that a web server will chop pieces from a URL until it reaches a physical file. For a query URL, the extra information after the question mark is retained in its QUERY_STRING variable while extraneous directory path information is passed in the variable PATH_INFO. For both Perl and PHP, these are extracted from the entries in an array; for Perl, this array is called is $ENV and $_SERVER is the PHP equivalent. Thus, $ENV{QUERY_STRING} and $_SERVER{‘QUERY_STRING’} traps what comes after the “?” while $ENV{PATH_INFO} and $_SERVER{‘PATH_INFO’} picks up the extra information following the file name (the “/id/394/” in the example). From there on, the usual rules apply regarding cleaning of any input but changing from one to another should be too arduous.

Buying OEM Vista?

A few days ago, I mused over buying OEM Vista if/when the time came for me to do upgrade. Then, I came to the conclusion that OEM was a no-no unless you bought it installed on a system. In an article on the PC Magazine website, things seem not to be as cut and dried as that. Apparently, the perceived wisdom is that if you are building a system for yourself and you agree to provide all support as the system builder to yourself as the system user, then everything is OK under the licence. Also, there seems to be a trend among resellers that it is not them who are subject to the terms of the licence but the customers who purchase the OEM software. It is all just a little bit confusing. Draw your own conclusions…

Pondering storage options

The combination of curiosity and a little spare time had me browsing online computing technology stores recently. A spot of CD and DVD burning brought on by a flurry of Linux distribution testing reminded me of the possibility. Because I have built up a sizeable library of digital photos, ensuring that I have backups of them is something that needs doing. A 2 GB Samsung external hard drive is brought to life every now and again for that purpose but the prospect of using Blu-Ray discs has appealed to me. After all capacities of 25 GB for single layer discs and 50 GB for dual layer ones sound not inappropriate for my purposes. However, they aren’t a cheap option at the time of writing with each disc costing in the region of £3-4 at one place where I was looking. The cost of BD writers themselves seems not to be so bad though with a few in the £60-100 bracket; any lower than this and you could end up with a combo drive that reads Blu-Ray discs and writes to DVD’s and CD’s so a modicum of concentration is needed. As attractive as the idea might be, the cost of BD media means that I’ll wait a little while before deciding to take the plunge. The price premium at the moment is a reminder of the way that things used to be when CD and DVD writers first came on the market. It is very telling when discs come packaged in jewel cases, something that you won’t see too often with CD’s or DVD’s.

Another piece of storage excitement that hasn’t escaped me is the advent of SSD hard drives. With no moving parts like in conventional hard drives, they bring a speed boost. Concerns about their lifetimes and the numbers of read/write events per drive would stall me when it comes to storing personal data on them but using them for the likes of operating system files sounds attractive, especially with my partiality to Linux perhaps not hammering drives so much. As with any new technology, there is a price premium though a drive big enough for hosting an operating system can be acquired for less than £100. As with many of my hardware purchase brainwaves, there’s no rush but this is an option that I’ll keep at the back of my mind.

Another appealing notion is the idea of getting a NAS so that files can be shared between a few computers. While I have seen prices starting at just above £70 for single disk enclosures, these generally are a more expensive option than external drives and that’s before you consider the cost of any hard drives. Nevertheless, the advantages of a unit containing more than a single hard drive while operating as a print server for any compatible printer too. When you get to 4 or 5 hard drive trays, then the cost has mounted but that could be when they pay their way too. What reminded me of these was a bookazine on home networking that I recently found at a branch of WHSmith’s and their attractions are subject to the networking side of things being made to work without a drama. Once that’s out of the way, then their usefulness really does appeal.

Mulling over all these brainwaves is one thing but it doesn’t mean that the purse strings will become too loose in this age of economic constraint. In fact, pondering them may serve to staunch any impulse purchases. Sometimes, a spot of virtual shopping serves to control things rather than losing the run of oneself.

Office 2007 on test…

With its imminent launch and having had a quick at one of its beta releases, I decided to give Office 2007 a longer look after it reached its final guise. This is courtesy of the demonstration version that can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website; I snagged Office Standard which contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Very generously, the trial version that I am using gives me until the end of March to come to my final decision.

And what are my impressions? Outlook, the application from the suite that I most use, has changed dramatically since Outlook 2002, the version that I have been using. Unless you open up an email in full screen mode, the ribbon interface so prevalent in other members of the Office family doesn’t make much of an appearance here. The three-paned interface taken forward from Outlook 2003 is easy to get around. I especially like the ability to collapse/expand a list of emails from a particular sender: it really cuts down on clutter. The ZoneAlarm anti-spam plug-in on my system was accepted without any complaint as were all of my PST files. One thing that needed redoing was the IMAP connection to my FastMail webmail account but that was driven more by Outlook warning messages than by necessity from a user experience point of view. I have still to get my Hotmail account going but I lost that connection when still using Outlook 2002 and after I upgraded to IE7.

What do I make of the ribbon interface? As I have said above, Outlook is not pervaded by the new interface paradigm until you open up an email. Nevertheless, I have had a short encounter with Word 2007 and am convinced that the new interface works well. It didn’t take me long to find my way around at all. In fact, I think that they have made a great job of the new main menu triggered by the Office Button (as Microsoft call it) and got all sorts of things in there; the list includes Word options, expanded options for saving files (including the new docx file format, of course, but the doc format has not been discarded either) and a publishing capability that includes popular blogs (WordPress.com, for instance) together with document management servers. Additionally, the new zoom control on the bottom right-hand corner is much nicer than the old drop down menu. As regards the “ribbon”, this is an extension of the tabbed interfaces seen in other applications like Adobe HomeSite and Adobe Dreamweaver, the difference being that the tabs are only place where any function is found because there is no menu back up. There is an Add-ins tab that captures plug-ins to things like Adobe Distiller for PDF creation. Macromedia in its pre-Adobe days offered FlashPaper for doing the same thing and this seems to function without a hitch in Word 2007. Right-clicking on any word in your document not only gives you suggested corrections to misspellings but also synonyms (no more Shift-F7 for the thesaurus, though it is still there is you need it) and enhanced on-the-spot formatting options. A miniature formatting menu even appears beside the expected context menu; I must admit that I found that a little annoying at the beginning but I suppose that I will learn to get used to it.

My use of Outlook and Word will continue, the latter’s blogging feature is very nice, but I haven’t had reason to look at Excel or PowerPoint in detail thus far. From what I have seen, the ribbon interface pervades in those applications too. Even so, my impressions the latest Office are very favourable. The interface overhaul may be radical but it does work. Their changing the file formats is a more subtle change but it does mean that users of previous Office versions will need the converter tool in order for document sharing to continue. Office 97 was the last time when we had to cope with that and it didn’t seem to cause the world to grind to a halt.

Will I upgrade? I have to say that it is very likely given what is available in Office Home and Student edition. That version misses out on having Outlook but the prices mean that even buying Outlook standalone to compliment what it offers remains a sensible financial option. Taking a look at the retail prices on dabs.com confirms the point:

Office Home and Student Edition: £94.61

Office Standard Edition: £285.50

Office Standard Edition Upgrade: £175.96

Outlook 2007: £77.98

Having full version software for the price of an upgrade sounds good to me and it is likely to be the route that I take, if I replace the Office XP Standard Edition installation that has been my mainstay over the last few years. Having been on a Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Windows 98 SE > Windows ME upgrade treadmill and endured the hell raised when reinstallation becomes unavoidable, the full product approach to getting the latest software appeals to me over the upgrade pathway. In fact, I bought Windows XP Professional as the full product in order to start afresh after moving on from Windows 9x.

A collection of lessons learnt about web hosting

Putting this blog back on its feet after a spot of web hosting bother caused me to learnt a bit more about web hosting than I  otherwise might have done. Here’s a selection and they are in no particular order:

1. Store your passwords securely and where you can find them because you never know how a foul up of your own making can strike. For example, a faux pas with a configuration file is all that’s needed to cause havoc for a database site such as a WordPress blog. After all, nobody’s perfect and your hosting provider may not get you out of trouble as quickly as you might like.
2. Get a MySQL database or equivalent as part of your package rather than buying one separately. If your provider allows a trial period, then changing from one package to another could be cheaper and easier than if you bought a separate database and needed to jettison it because you changed from, say, a Windows package to a Linux one or vice versa.
3. It might be an idea to avoid a reseller unless the service being offered is something special. Going for the sake of lower cost can be a false economy and it might be better to cut out the middleman altogether and go direct to their provider. Being able to distinguish a reseller from a real web host would be nice but I don’t see that ever becoming a reality; it is hardly in resellers’ interests, after all.
4. Should you stick with a provider that takes several days to resolve a serious outage? The previous host of this blog had a major MySQL server outage that lasted for up to three days and seeing that was one of the factors that made me turn tail to go to a more trusted provider that I have used for a number of years. The smoothness of the account creation process might be another point worthy of consideration.
5. Sluggish system support really can frustrate, especially if there is no telephone support provided and the online ticketing system seems to take forever to deliver solutions. I would advise strongly that a host who offers a helpline is a much better option than someone who doesn’t. Saying all of that, I think that it’s best to be patient and, when your website is offline, that might not be as easy you’d hope it to be.
6. Setting up hosting or changing from one provider to another can take a number of days because of all that needs doing. So, it’s best to allow for this and plan ahead. Account creation can be very quick but setting up the website can take time while domain name transfer can take up to 24 hours.
7. It might not take the same amount of time to set up Windows hosting as its Linux equivalent. I don’t know if my experience was typical but I have found that the same provider set up Linux hosting far quicker (within 30 minutes) than it did for a Windows-based package (several hours).
8. Be careful what package you select; it can be easy to pick the wrong one depending on how your host’s sight is laid out and what they are promoting at the time.
9. You can have a Perl/PHP/MySQL site working on Windows, even with IIS being used in place instead of Apache. The Linux/Apache/Perl/PHP/MySQL approach might still be better, though.
10. The Windows option allows for ASP, .Net and other such Microsoft technologies to be used. I have to say that my experience and preference is for open source technologies so Linux is my mainstay but learning about the other side can never hurt from a career point of view. After, I am writing this on a Windows Vista powered laptop to see how the other half live as much as anything else.
11. Domains serviced by hosting resellers can be visible to the systems of those from whom they buy their wholesale hosting. This frustrated my initial attempts to move this blog over because I couldn’t get an account set up for technologytales.com because a reseller had it already on the same system. It was only when I got the reseller to delete the account with them that things began to run more smoothly.
12. If things are not going as you would like them, getting your account deleted might be easier than you think so don’t procrastinate because you think it a hard thing to do. Of course, it goes without saying that you should back things up beforehand.

More user interface font scaling options in Adobe Lightroom Classic

Earlier in the year, I upgraded my monitor to a 34-inch widescreen Iiyama XUB3493WQSU. At the time, I was in wonderment at what I was doing even if I have grown used to it now. For one thing, it made the onscreen text too small so I ended up having to scale things up in both Linux and Windows. The former proved to be more malleable than the latter and that impression also applies to the main subject of this piece.

What I also found is that I needed to scale the user interface font sizes within Adobe Lightroom Classic running within a Windows virtual machine on VirtualBox. That can be done by going to Edit > Preferences through the menus and then going to the Interface tab in the dialogue box that appears where you can change the Font Size setting using the dropdown menu and confirm changes using the OK button.

However, the range of options is limited. Medium appears to be the default setting while the others include Small, Large, Larger and Largest. Large scales by 150%, Larger by 200% and Largest by 250%. Of these, Large was the setting that I chose though it always felt too big to me.

Out of curiosity, I decided to probe further only to find extra possibilities that could be selected by direct editing of a configuration file. This file can be found in C:\Users\[user account]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences and is called Lightroom Classic CC 7 Preferences.agprefs. In there, you need to find the line containing AgPanel_baseFontSize and change the value enclosed within quotes and save the file. Taking a backup beforehand is wise even if the modification is not a major one.

The available choices are scale125, scale140, scale150, scale175, scale180, scale200 and scale250. Some of these may be recognisable as those available through the Lightroom Classic user interface. In my case, I chose the first on the list so the line in the configuration file became:

AgPanel_baseFontSize="scale125"

There may be good reasons for the additional options not being available through the user interface but things are working out OK for me for now. It is another tweak that helps me to get used to the larger screen size and its higher resolution.

More Linux Distributions

If a certain Richard Stallman had his way, Linux would be called GNU/Linux because he wants GNU to have some of the credit, but we’re lazy creatures and we all call it Linux instead. What still amazes me is the number of Linux distributions that are out there. This list captures those that do not fit into other lists that you can find in the sidebar, so do look at the others as well.

Many fit into the desktop and server computing paradigms while a minority are very distinctive. It is easier to write about the latter than the former, though personal experiences do add to any narrative. It is tempting to think that everything has become static after more than thirty years, yet that may be foolish given the ongoing flux in the world of technology. Only change is ever a constant presence.

More in the Way of Privacy

The controversy about security agencies eavesdropping on internet communications has upset some and here are some distros offering anonymity and privacy. Of course, none of these should be used for unlawful purposes since there are those in less liberal countries who need invisibility to speak their minds.

Qubes OS

It is harder and harder to create a Linux distro that is very different from the rest, but this one uses application virtualisation for added security. You can organise your software into different domains so that you work more securely when moving data between applications from different domains.

Robolinux

There is more than a hint of privacy-mindedness in this distro when you look long enough at what it offers. Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments are part of the offer and there is added software for extra privacy and security.

Tails

This is an option for those who are worried about being tracked online. All internet connections are sent via the Tor network and it is run exclusively as a live distro from CD, DVD or USB stick drive too, so no trace is left on any PC. The basis is Debian and the distro’s name is an acronym: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System. For us living in a democratic country, the effort may seem excessive but that changes in other places where folk are not so fortunate. The use of Tor may not be perfect but it should help in combination with the use of different sessions for different tasks and encrypting any files. There even is an option to make the desktop appear like that of Windows XP for extra discreteness of use.

Whonix

Most Linux distros that have enhanced security and anonymity as a feature are not installable on a PC, but that exactly is what’s unique about Whonix. It’s based on Debian but all internet connections go via the Tor network. The latter is called Whonix-Gateway with Whonix-Workstation being what you use to work on your system. It may sound like being overly careful but it has me intrigued.

Entertainment

In many ways, these are appliance distros for anyone who just wants an install-it-and-go approach to things. That works better with dedicated devices than with multipurpose machines, so that is one thing that needs to be kept in mind.

Lakka

The idea behind this offering is what it offers console gamers. Legacy games and peripherals will work and there even is support for Raspberry Pi as well.

LibreELEC

The main purpose of this distro is to offer a home for the KODI entertainment centre on PC and Raspberry Pi devices. It follows from the now defunct OpenELEC project, which ran into trouble when developers’ voices were not given a hearing.

OSMC

The acronym stands for Open-Source Media Centre and there is KODI here too. Though the distro also is based on Debian, one is tempted to wonder why anyone would not just install that and install KODI on top of it. The answer possibly has something got to do with added user-friendliness for those who do not need to deal with such things.

Mandriva Offshoots

Mandrake once was a spin of Red Hat with a more user-friendly focus. In the days before the appearance of Ubuntu, it would have been a choice for those not wanting to overcome obstacles such as a level of hardware support that was much less than what we have today. Later, Mandrake became Mandriva following litigation and the acquisition of Conectiva in 2005. The organisation has declined since those heady days and it became defunct during 2015. Its legacy continues though in the form of two spin-off projects, so all the work of forebears has not been lost.

Mageia

It was the uncertainty surrounding the future of Mandriva that originally caused this project to be started. Beginnings have been promising, so this is a one to watch, though you have to wonder if the now community-based OpenMandriva is stealing some of its limelight.

OpenMandriva

Of the pair that is listed here, it is OpenMandriva which is a continuation of the now-defunct Mandriva. Seeing how things progress for a project with user-friendliness at its heart will be of interest in these days when Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint are so pervasive. Even with those, there are KDE options, so there is a challenge in place.

ROSA

Anything Russian may not be everyone’s choice given the state of world affairs at the time of writing, yet this still is an offshoot of Mandriva so it gets a mention in this list. Desktop environment options include KDE, XFCE and LXQt and there are various use cases covered by a range of solutions.

Others

Not every distro falls in the above categories, and some that you find here may surprise you. There are some better-known names like openSUSE that go their way.

EasyOS

Aside from the founder’s dislike of ISO disk images for whatever reason, this distro has its own eccentricities. For example, it is container-friendly, runs in memory as root and much more. This is branded as an experimental distro, and it is that in many ways.

GeckoLinux

This project creates respins of openSUSE for the sake of a more refined experience.  For instance, there are live booting ISO images as well as inclusion of media codecs. There is plenty of choice too when it comes to desktop environments.

Gentoo

From what I have seen, this project seems to be supporting the same needs as Arch, albeit with all software needing to be compiled, so there’s more of a DIY approach. The wiki also comes in handy for those users.

KaOS

Billing itself as a lean independent distribution focussing on QT and KDE, this is built from the ground up without any dependence on other distros. Some tools, like pacman, naturally come from elsewhere in this otherwise standalone offering.

MakuluLinux

Here is another distro apart from Ubuntu that has an African name, the Zulu for big chief this time around. It came to my notice among the pages of the now defunct Micro Mart magazine and uses MATE, XFCE, Enlightenment and KDE as its desktop environment choices.

openSUSE

SuSE Linux was one of the first Linux distros that I started to explore and I even had it loaded on my home PC as a secondary operating system for quite a while too before my attention went elsewhere. Only for a PC Plus cover-mounted CD, it never might have discovered it and it bested Red Hat, which was as prominent then, as Fedora is today. When SuSE fell into Novell’s hands, it became both openSUSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition. The former is the community and the latter is what Novell, now itself an Attachmate Group company, offers to business customers. As it happens, I continue to keep an eye on openSUSE and even had it on a secondary PC before font resolution deficiencies had me looking elsewhere. While it’s best known for its KDE variant, there is a GNOME one too and it is this that I have been examining.

PCLinuxOS

There was a time when this was being touted as an Ubuntu killer but it never seems to have made good on that promise. Recent troubles within the project haven’t helped either, especially with a long wait between releases.

Pisi

This Turkish distro recently got reviewed in Linux Format and they were not satisfied with its documentation. It does not help that the website is not in English, so you need a translation tool of your choosing for this one.

Solus

Though there also is a spin using the MATE desktop environment, this distro is perhaps better known as the home for the Budgie desktop environment. All of this is for computing and not its business or enterprise counterpart. There is nothing to say against that and may make it feel a little more friendly.

Tizen

The name sounded similar for some reason and I reckon that’s because Samsung has smartphones running Tizen on sale. The whole point of the project is to power mobile computing platforms with only the mention of netbooks sullying an otherwise non-PC target market that includes tablets and TV’s. It’s overseen by the Linux Foundation too.

The wonders of mod_rewrite

When I wrote about tidying dynamic URL’s a little while back, I had no inkling that that would be a second part to the tale. My discovery of mod_rewrite, an Apache module that facilitates URL translation. The effect is that one URL is presented to the user in the browser address bar, and the exact same URL is also seen by search engines, while another is passed to the server for processing. It might sound like subterfuge but it works very well once you manage to get it set up properly. The web host for my hillwalking blog/photo gallery has everything configured such it is ready to go but the same did not apply to the offline Apache 2.2.x server that I have going on my own Windows XP box. There were two parts to getting it working there:

1. Activating mod-rewrite on the server: this is as easy as uncommenting a line in the httpd.conf file for the site (the line in question is: LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so).
2. Ensuring that the .htaccess file in the root of the web server directory is active. You need to set the values of the AllowOverride directives for the server root and CGI directories to All so that .htaccess is active. Not doing it for the latter will result in the an error beginning with the following: Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden. Having Allow from All set for the required directories is another option to consider when you see errors like that.

Once you have got the above sorted, adding this line to .htaccess: RewriteEngine On. Preceding it with an Options directive to ensure that FollowSymLinks and SymLinksIfOwnerMatch are switched on does no harm at all and may even be needed to get things running. That done, you can set about putting mod_write to work with lines like this:

RewriteRule ^pages/(.*)/?$ pages.php?query=$1

The effect of this is to take http://www.website.com/pages/input and convert it into a form for action by the server; in this case, that is http://www.website.com/pages.php?query=input. Anything contained by a bracket is assigned to the value of a system-named variable. If you have several bracketed sections, they are assigned to sequentially numbered variables as follows: $1 for the first, $2 for the second and so on. It’s all good stuff when you get it going and not only does it make things look much neater but it also possesses an advantage when it comes to future-proofing too. Web addresses can be kept constant over time, even if things change behind the scenes. It means that returning visitors will find what they saw the last time that they visited and surely must ensure good karma in eyes of those all important search engines.