All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

IIS & Invalid Folder Names

Internet

Recently at work, I was working on cleaning up some of the pages which are used to view the statistics of various domains. One in particular is the branded domain that is used for marketing purposes, while the actual content for the site resides at sub-domains.

For the sake of discussion, lets assume the branded domain is www.domain.com, while each of the sub-domains are broken down by year; yyyy.domain.com.

The existing structure of the statistics, only allowed for a single years worth of statistics to be stored (logically speaking). Under the document root, there were simply a bunch of folders representing the current month and previous months that had elapsed.

Doing the logical thing, I created folders named yyyy.domain.com with sub-folders named by monty with a yy suffix on them. After spending considerable time collating all of the statistics for the domain (there are tens of gigabytes of log files), it was finally complete.

As I went to view the statistics, I was greeted with a rather strange error message from IIS:

  1. HTTP 403.1 Forbidden: Execute Access Forbidden

You would normally interpret that sort of an error as a permission problem. For instance, you were running some sort of script/cgi and the virtual host had no execute permissions. Well after checking the vhost information, script execution was turned on. So for the sake of testing, I increased it to scripts and executables. Still nothing, I was beginning to wonder what was going on. I then checked the permissions on all the folders I had created (I created them over the network, thought maybe the right rwx permissions hadn’t come across), nope.. they were fine too.

After a couple of hours of head scratching and googling, still nothing. There were thousands of pages relating to actual cgi/script/executable problems, however mine was plain static HTML.

The problem: I named my folders yyyy.domain.com. For some reason, IIS considers a folder with dots/periods in them to be invalid.

The solution: remove the dots in the sub-folders and replace them with underscoress (_). Bing, worked like a charm.

Much Ado About Nothing

General

At this stage, I have no idea if TextPattern will stay or not. In the very foreseeable future, I will have to write/implement something for content management for my father. This was actually one of the driving forces for installed a few different blogging packages to see if I could use one of these and build upon it to save myself considerable time.

Initially I installed WordPress, however at this stage (v1.2.2), it doesn’t support multiple blogs and categories of those blogs. As such, if I wanted to maintain a nice clean URL structure (and who doesn’t, really?), I would need to install multiple copies of it and prefix each installation with the section name of the site. A very poor hack in my opinion. That said, apparently version 1.5 of WordPress will support it so I might come back to it before I get into this fully.

Directly after removing WordPress, I installed TextPattern. This system in my opinion is far more complex and the user interface isn’t anywhere near as intuitive, however might be more powerful. This package supports multiple blogs (sections of your site) and categories, which is excellent. However, it doesn’t support categories of a sections (just gross categories for your entire site). I essentially want to end up with a URL structure like somedomain.com/about/site/database/ and somedomain.com/about/site/language/ and so forth. Nice clean URLs that are future proof.

The other key thing I need is the ability to write modules for it. Among the simple content management that I require, I will also need to write a module/component to act as a simple shopping cart/gallery. My father intends to list stock on there and to have descriptions of that stock with images and so forth.

I can only hope that WordPress comes to the rescue before I need to start doing this and pray the source for it is clean an extensible. If it isn’t, I will be putting more time into completing my own content management system and components for them to use.

Virgin Content

General

Well, here we are again. Without question, this is the first post on the new platform (TextPattern) and while the site looks very poor at the moment, this will be a simple test to see how things pan out.

I can only hope that some time soon, I get the time to put into the site. Like anyone with a website, I’d like to make the template clean and usable, which would be a long stretch from where we are at the moment.

Here it to finding time for myself and my other half.