"What's the worst that could happen?" You know, in horror movies, that when the main character says something like that, they are about to die in some horrible fashion. Liz thought she had it all worked out, make a simple change to her .htaccess file, load it and go. When the Web site went down, that wasn't in her plans:
One of my worst horror stories concerns mt .htaccess file, which I use to disallow hotlinkers by name. I have a site that sells downloadable stock art, which seems to be a hotlinker magnet.
Even though I carefully copied and pasted the new code for the latest offending site, somehow or other, I left one square bracket off the end of a line of code.
I had thought that the worst possibility in case of error would be that the script wouldn't work, but it knocked my entire 350-page site off line and it was 4 hours before I discovered that and found the cause!
Moral:
- Make a backup before making any changes to an .htaccess file, even simple no-brainer changes.
- ALWAYS clear your cache, then go to the site to make sure it's still up and running after the .htaccess update. If the unthinkable happens, just upload the unrevised backup file.
