Today whilst eating breakfast I saw that the Drupal site I’ve been playing with I broke (that’ll learn me for opening files and accidentally making changes to them, save all not good doh!) so I decided that I would just extract the package over the top and things would be fine. I refreshed the page that I was on (/admin/build/block) and got a charming looking 404 error. Figuring it was just an issue with the extract I retried and got the error again. I looked at the directory and saw that index.php was there so I checked the root of the directory and sure enough Drupal appeared. Part of Drupal’s package is a file named ‘.htaccess’ which is great for the first time that you install, but this file also contains configuration information as well: in this case the ‘RewriteBase’ needed for the fancy URL code to work properly. When I first saw it I thought “well, its a well written .htaccess, I can see that it wouldn’t have any issues” but now I realise the mistake in that thought having to go back and fix up my .htaccess file again.

Progressing forward in the day I returned to work on the voting system again. More features, improvements and fun though I introduced a bug on Friday by adding the postcode search which I quickly fixed up. The other aspect of the system is starting to work properly and I’m getting some sample data in and validating the system. I did have an incredibly strange SQL bug with a non-printable character which I’m not quite sure how it got introduced but managed to work out (yay for hex dumps!). Looking forward I’m going to need to put in a batch detail view so that we can look at individual batches and with any luck it should be done.

Now its time to get through my weekend blogging back log and publish some older blogs!