For those of you that might not know (and I was one of you about a month ago), Zeus is a Web server package that’s used instead of apache by some Web hosts. If you’re planning to use WordPress, and you have a choice between apache and Zeus, I would definitely recommend choosing apache. However, sometimes you don’t have a choice in the matter; and you have to do what you can to make things work.

WordPress will work out of the box with Zeus, but a lot of things won’t behave the way you might expect. One of those things is the permalink structure.

Instead of getting nice, clean URLs like “http://example.com/blog/2012/01/my-first-blog-post/”, you get “index.php” shoved in there (like “http://example.com/index.php/blog/2012/01/my-first-blog-post/”). You can correct this issue, but it’s not quite as simple as updating an .htaccess file (in fact, without some jiggery-pokery by your Web host, Zeus doesn’t support .htaccess at all). Instead, you have to apply a rewrite script to your server configuration.

After quite a bit of searching and trial & error, I finally found a working rewrite script configuration for WordPress. A hosting company called ZipHosting posted the scripts below in their knowledgebase. The first script is set up for you to use if WordPress is hosted in a subdirectory, and the second is for use with WordPress in the root directory.

After a long break, I am hopefully back to blogging somewhat regularly again. I needed to take some serious time off to re-balance my priorities in life, and to get a solid grasp on all of the things I need to do on a daily basis.

At least at the start, I’m not planning to try to blog every 2 or 3 days the way I had been doing; but I am hoping to post a new article once each week.

I apologize to anyone that actually reads my blog posts. I didn’t initially intention to disappear for quite so long.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has just announced the release of version 3.3 of the WordPress blogging/cms software. It looks like the majority of the changes are cosmetic inside the admin tool including some updates to the help for new users. The big feature I noticed in their overview video below is the new ability to easily import a tumblr blog into WordPress.

The one big update I’d love is the ability to set the “add an image” option to always be set to “by URL” because I use (and I assume others do too) Amazon S3 for storing images.

You can update your WordPress software to 3.3 now by using the auto-update function with the administration interface.

Here’s the features overview video for WordPress 3.3 from the WordPress team:

This morning Google announced that they have moved the Google IO conference from May to June 2012. The blog post on the Google developer blog has all of the details on the new dates. Google I/O 2012 will now take place from June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco.

No details yet on when registration will open for the event – last year the registration sold out in minutes so you better be quick this year.

I attended the event last year as a paid attendee and thought it was ok overall – way too crowded. Frankly it seemed like most people went for the stuff they handed out which included a Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet and a Samsung Chromebook.

I wonder how Google will deal with the people who already booked travel and have to pay fees to change their tickets/hotel bookings.

I received the email below from the Nokia Developer Launchpad team. If you are building an app for either the Series 40, Symbian or MeeGo platforms, Nokia is offering to review your mobile app to help increase the user experience. It looks like there are only 40 reviews available, so you better contact Nokia asap if you want your app reviewed.

Here are the important pieces of the Nokia offer:

On November 17, Engine Yard will host a discussion around the future of PHP. Engine Yard describes the event, “If you are a PHP developer using PEAR and Pyrus, we invite you to join us this week as we explore the future of PEAR and Pyrus. We’ll be discussing issues such as where PEAR/Pyrus will be going in the next few years, what obstacles may be on the horizon, and how they’re going to get where they’re going.”

One of the panelists is Till Klampäckel who many of you know as one of the people who worked with HTMLCenter for many years. Till also just published a book (in German) about the database service CouchDB which you can purchase on Amazon.de.

The panel is free, will be streamed live and the panel will take questions via Twitter. If you are interested, you can register for the event here.

Earlier this evening, HP sent out an email message saying that they are finally officially out of TouchPads. I didn’t even realize they had gotten the final batch in stock; but, apparently they did, and those are now gone. Following is the text of the email they sent:

Viddler, a service that aspired to be a stand-out competitor to other video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo, announced yesterday that, effective immediately, they are going to stop allowing users to sign up for their free personal accounts. All existing personal users of Viddler will be able to maintain their accounts (for the time being, at least), but all future registrations will have to be premium accounts. Following is the announcement that was sent out to existing personal account holders:

Anyone that’s used Google Analytics to track cross-domain requests has probably run up against the fact that Analytics adds some really ugly GET variables to the end of your URLs when you click on links. Not only are they ugly, but they also can stop things like WP Super Cache from caching your pages. We also found that the query string appended by Google Analytics was causing server errors when appended to the URLs of some of our hosted apps.

There is a little-publicized feature in Analytics, though, that lets you change the query string into a hash string. Therefore, instead of having some long, ugly string that can mess things up (and, to be honest, long, confusing query strings can sometimes scare users); you get a long, ugly hash appended to the URL, instead (which has no effect on the way the page is rendered, and, therefore, doesn’t mess up nearly as many things).

First of all, let me apologize for having been so absent over the last few weeks. As you may or may not have heard already, we just launched the new website at University of Mary Washington, and things have been hectic trying to put the final pieces into place.

One of those final pieces was to get WP Super Cache up and running on the site, in order to keep our server from overloading. When we first launched, I didn’t realize that we didn’t have the plugin configured properly, and our various plugins and theme functions really started to drag things to a crawl.

After doing a lot of digging and debugging, I found that WP Super Cache was ignoring cached files throughout our server because they all included GET variables.