Okay, so here's some fun. Make yourself comfortable.

I went out to find an image for Needcoffee from the archives we've already got on the site so I wouldn't have to grab it from elsewhere (remember, kids: recycle!) and realized that some of our archival pages weren't loading properly on the new server.

Brief explanation: on Version 3 of the site (pre-Wordpress) we used frames. We're not proud of it, but it made sense for 1998. The content portion of the site was an .htm file. The frame that went around it and contained the masthead and the menu/sidebar was an .html file. So you could have, for example, a DVD review of Drop Dead Fred and the review itself was ddfred.htm while the frame that held it was ddfred.html.

Again, it was the best we could muster at the time.

Anyway, while checking out the new server for this old image I wanted, I discovered that the .html versions of pages were coughing up a lung. "An error occurred while processing this directive." Lovely. But the .htm versions were fine. What to do?

Well, tear open a .html file and saw that AXS, the web tracking bit we used to use on the old site (and still use in the archives) wasn't working because it was pointing to an old CGI directory and the CGI directory wasn't kosher any longer.

So the first thing I tried to do was get the old CGI directory to work, but I couldn't seem to figure out how to do that. And I wanted to get the damn thinking working. So I decided, hey! Screw it, I'll just to a rewrite via the .htaccess and when people go to the .html version, I'll just send them to the direct review instead. That's actually better from an SEO perspective because back when we setup the whole framed system SEO wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's pants.

But somehow I botched it and the .htaccess blew up the site for a few minutes. I had a Redirect that never redirected anywhere, and it didn't matter that it was in my /html/dvd/ directory, the server read down through .htaccess, couldn't go any further and barfed.

Why did this happen, children? Because Uncle Widge fucked himself over. He got in a hurry and forgot the cardinal rule of screwing around with your site:

The Cardinal Rule of Screwing Around With Your Site:

That's right. When you forget the Cardinal Rule, Yahweh himself will laugh at you and your site will explode.

So. I finally got that corrected after a few minutes outage, and I was able to find some info on how to do this in .htaccess.

Not that I think anybody out there has the same setup as the old Needcoffee.com site, but still. You can futz with this to match your own site.

This is a variation on what I found at SEOBook, which was the best and closest to what I was trying to do.

Disclaimer:

So.

I basically have an .htaccess in the subdirectory where I want to make this change.

I added this to the top:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.html http://www.needcoffee.com/html/$1.htm [r=301,nc]

Here's what I can tell you. The Options and RewriteEngine statement make the thing work to begin with. The rule itself says for every .html hit, rewrite and resend them instead to .htm. Also, it gives a 301 redirect, which is good because search engines need to be able to find the content that's been "moved," or in this case, simply bypassed.

The one thing I don't understand is, the way I read this code, it looks like it should only work for the /html/ directory, but it instead works in all subdirectories. So that I'm clueless about. Just for the moment it works.

There? Aren't you sorry you asked now?

Update: Shade at That's My Stapler tries to help my inept ass out. I think I almost understand what he's saying…I can do coding, me.

This is interesting. So Headspace2, the badass plugin that I'm using over on Needcoffee currently, has a Frame Breaker built into it.

WTF is a Frame Breaker?

Well, you know how when you search in Google Images, you get presented the site below a Google frame up top? The Frame Breaker breaks you out of that frame, natch, so you get served the site without the Google flavoring up top.

I always did wonder about that, so I flicked it on. That was around the 22nd or 23rd of October.

I decided to come back and check to see how it had affected my traffic on Google Images.

Now, let me state this up front. My understanding is that Google Images doesn't update very often. And I also understand that for the majority of my images, I haven't SEO'd them up worth a good goddamn because at the time I was putting them up, I had no idea why I should. (Of course, people still seem to find me and force me to do shit like this.)

So I don't have a great deal of traffic coming in anyway. But let's look.

Google Images spiked the day I turned it on, then went to a reasonable trickle.

As for Google Images.ca? I went from a trickle…to nothing.

Google Images.uk? From an erratic mess to…nothing.

And pretty much on down the line.

Did it do anything to my regular Google results? No. No discernable change.

In fact, if I just do "images" and pull that chart up, I spike, and then crater.

Fascinating. Now. One of two things is happening.

1. Either Google Images doesn't like the frame break and has something built in which makes me show up lower in the results because of it. Or…

2. Google Images needs the frame to show up as Google Images in my Analytics.

I don't know which. If I had a huge amount of Google Images traffic, I would be able to see if my Google hits went up an equivalent amount, so maybe Images traffic was being counted as regular traffic. Just a theory.

Or, if I had Analytics installed on my Version 3 archival part of the site, which has no Frame Breaker, I could see if it suffered, yes or no.

I've heard rumors that breaking the frame caused Google Images to not speak to you anymore, but never really saw that substantiated. And trying to Google terms like "frame breaker google images penalty" and the like didn't really get me anywhere.

Either way, I'm taking off the Frame Breaker. I'll see if it changes anything and if so, how quickly. And hopefully, I'll get Google Images out here to reindex my site with the SEO'd bits I do have.

If anybody has their own experience, I'd love to hear it.

Well, you haven't seen me a lot around here because I've been up to my elbows in code over on Needcoffee. I've been trying to optimize the site while fighting with WP-Cache, which I can't live without due to my traffic, but which also kills me if I try to update the site while it's turned on. I'm still trying to figure out that silly shit.

Anyway, now that I've finally gotten a bunch of superfluous ne'er-do-wells gone from my access.log file, I can finally look at it and see what's happening moment by moment to try and address the problem. One thing I wanted to see, though, is what is really taxing the memory of my server space.

Trouble is, the access.log I get from Dreamhost (which I can only assume is the same sort you get from where you are) looks like this:

x.x.x.x – - [26/Apr/2007:00:36:50 -0700] "GET /wp-content/plugins/podpress/podpress_js.php HTTP/1.1" 200 2311 "http://www.needcoffee.com/2006/03/08/power-rangers-dino-thunder-vol-3-dvd-review/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3"

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