I was having a heck of a time trying to get my mod_rewrite rules working on the new site I’ve been putting together. I like the new permalinks in WordPress so I thought I’d use a similar technique. I hadn’t done it before, but it can’t be too hard, right? I got them working fine locally, but they just didn’t take on the real server. I was tweaking and fiddling, the rules just weren’t catching.

After several hours of this, I IM’ed Scott who finally asked the right question: “What is your AllowOverrides setting in your httpd.conf?”

Um…

Yeah, it was pretty much the web developer equivelent of “is your computer turned on”, but it was the right question. Sho’nuff – there it was: AllowOverrides none.

The moral of this story? “Don’t be an idiot” comes to mind; but it never hurts to check the basics either…