It needed to be said...

IT departments do a great job with the things they do, but they can't do it all. Nor should they be asked to. It's enough enough these days dealing with security and keeping everything running smoothly. IT has highly trained people, but they are not web designers and they are most certainly not schooled in SEO (search engine optimization).

That said, here's the article.

Technical warning: this may make your eyes glaze over unless you're a techie type. :-)

Every once in a while I have to learn something I didn't expect to learn, but which, upon its accomplishment, makes me feel very pleased that I was able to find out about something so useful and share it with others who might be having the same problem.

I was installing WAMP today, which basically turns my computer into a server that is then able to process websites under development. This gives me the ability to try out coding on a test server without disturbing a live site. This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, and now with all new sites being created in Content Management Systems it's become pretty much a necessity. Plus, I want to be able to write some code for various reasons and this way I can test it without having to be online. Much more convenient.

Despite following all instructions I  found, I could not get WAMP to work for me. I went to the forums and looked for solutions, finding a list of things to check. I went through that list and amde sure I did everything suggested, but was still not having any luck. The key to Wamp's functioning correctly had to be use of port 80, it was the only thing left. I needed to use port 80 for WAMP, and something had to be blocking it. I had closed down all the programs I had running that it was suggested I close down, but the problem was still the same. I needed a way to find out what was running on port 80.

My research on the web paid off, and I finally discovered how to find out what's using what port on my computer. It involved a Windows utility named "netstat".

More and more I have had to be delving into the powerful tool of htaccess. When dealing with a large, dynamic site, sometimes it can take a good bit of research to put together the right code to get things to work, and with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) figuring out how to write redirects for dynamic pages can take quite a while. Code for simple page redirects looks much like this:

The first two lines must be in place in the htaccess file, once only, for redirects to work. The 3rd and last line is the actual redirect code.This produces a 301 redirect, necessary for search engine optimization purposes to retain the page rank of the original page.

One could also write:

The only difference is in typing out "permanent" vs. "301".

In this case though, the page I wanted to redirect looked like this

http://www.domainname.com/dynamicpage.php?id=2

The normal simpler method of redirection doesn't work because of that question mark and id at the end. The working code I finally came up with looked like this:

Note that the RewriteCond line show the id=2. This was done because there was a particular page I wanted to have redirected to a new static page. It would need to be done differently if I was doing a general rewrite of all the dynamic pages served from the same dynamicpage.php.

In the second line, note the question mark at the end of the new URL. That ? removed the dynamic part of the url, " ?id=2", which otherwise shows up on the rewritten url when the page is redirected. And of course we add the R=301 to make sure it's a permanent redirect (without the =301 the server would automatically make it a temporary redirect) and the "L" says it's the last rule.

This solved the problem, and it tests as search engine friendly.

You don't even have to be using a computer to get hacked these days....

I guess it's better than taking a gun and going postal (shooting your former fellow employees, in case you've been living in a cave), but not by much. Imagine trying to get to work in the morning and finding your car is completely disabled, or else being woken in the middle of the night by your car's horn that you can't shut off unless you remove the vehicle's battery:
Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars

Just goes to show--don't share your passwords with fellow employees, and for employers, when an employee leaves, then it's time to get your employees to change passwords.. which they should be doing periodically anyway.