Hoaxes.org

Welcome to hoaxes.org, the museum's new domain name.

As far as I can tell, the museum appears to have survived its move in one piece. It seems that the old URLs are being successfully redirected to the new domain. However, I haven't yet tested if things such as RSS or member logins all work correctly.

I have to say, the transition, just to get to this point, wasn't easy. I spent the last two days banging my head against my desk, trying to master the byzantine complexities of apache, .htaccess pages, and so-called 'regular expressions' (i.e. apache server code gobbledygook), in order to get the redirect to work correctly.

The biggest problem was that I'm an absolute beginner at apache server code. But also, the blogging software I use and the way it was initially installed (in a subfolder) created some challenging special circumstances that I needed to figure out how to code around.

Unfortunately, the coding challenge isn't entirely over yet. Right now, the old server is sending all requests for museumofhoaxes URLs over to the new hoaxes.org server. But soon I need to have the museumofhoaxes domain name point directly at the new server, and this will require slightly different code in order have the redirect work. If this doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry. It wouldn't have made any sense to me either a few days ago.

I'm thinking of trying to find a programming student at UCSD who I can pay a few bucks to help me with this next step of the coding. Because I'm not sure I can figure it out on my own. Or rather, I don't really want to spend the time figuring it out, when someone who knows what they're doing could code it in seconds.

But if anyone out there knows apache and would be willing to give some free advice, let me know. I'd be forever grateful!

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