The “I’m Voting Republican” Demonstrates a New -ism

June 15th, 2008 No Comments

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new video on Youtube labeled: “I’m Voting Republican.” The video is satirical, and is brilliant. It’s funny to boot. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it below. My thoughts follow.

The video is produced by Charlie Steak, a man who says he created the video because he is disappointed by eight years of Republican leadership, and I am too. Over the past year, Republicans have shown time and time again that they can waste and spend just as well as any Democrat. It’s not just the war, but the needless increases in social spending and useless earmarks as well. Our national deficit has ballooned, and the Republican principles of small government has been sacrificed on the altar of politics.

As I said before, the video is satirical, and if it remained that way, then that’s cool. However, here’s what Steak had to say: “”I love America. I’m so glad that I live here. I just don’t believe that we do treat all citizens equally, and I don’t believe that we should be spending what we’re spending on this war to make people in other countries hate us.”

There is nothing wrong whatsoever with the quote. In fact, what makes it all the better is that Steak is British. The fact that he loves America demonstrates why America is a great country. I don’t disagree with a single thing he says.

What I do disagree with are his methods. Here is a man who says all people should be treated equally, then produces a video skewering half the population. He mocks 50% of society, and derides them as frivolous and stupid.

Steak’s video exemplifies a new rising -ism in the United States that is being pushed by people of both sides. I call it politicism, meaning to discriminate on the basis of political party. If we want to move American forward, then we should do it by embracing all, rather than by producing videos ridiculing one-half of the nation.

Final Conclusion: The video? Hilarious. Steak? Misguided.

Posted in politics

Creating A User Subdomain

June 14th, 2008 No Comments

Recently, I wanted to be able to give everyone at the Young Writers Society, a site I run, their own subdomain. However, the challenge was in figuring out how to do this dynamically; after all, setting up a subdomain for each individual user would be exhausting and pointless.

The answer is of course mod_rewrite, a module in Apache. Now some caveats: if you’re planning on doing this, then you need mod_rewrite enabled. If you’re on a shared hosting plan, then most likely, this is not going to work. However, if it’s not enabled, you can at least try e-mailing your hosting provider and see if they won’t turn it on for you.

Step 1: Check To See If mod_rewrite Is Enabled

Read this: http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/enable-mod-rewrite-on-apache

Step 2: DNS Settings

If you are administrating your site through something like forumer, then give up right now. But if you own the domain for your forum or web site, you need to manage your DNS settings. Just add *.yourdomain.com as an A record, and point it the IP address of your site. To check your site’s IP address, go here: http://www.selfseo.com/find_ip_address_of_a_website.php. What we are doing here is just adding a wildcard for your domain.
Step 3: Edit .htaccess

If you don’t already have a .htaccess in your main directory, just create one. It’s just a text document, but instead of something.txt, it’s .htaccess. That’s it: just “.htaccess”. Be careful with it though; if you add an incorrect line to it, it could shut off access to your server.

This is what you will add:

Options +FollowSymlinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([^.]+)\.yourdomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/%1 [r=301,nc]

RewriteBase /

The first three lines are just telling your server that you’re using mod_rewrite. The next three lines are what’s imporant.

Explanation Of The .htaccess Edits

“RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain.com”

Not a biggie. Just saying if it doesn’t start with www, then we should move to the next line. Otherwise we ignore it all.

“RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([^.]+)\.yourdomain.com”

That ([^.)+)\ is capturing whatever subdomain the person enters.

“RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/%1 [r=301,nc]”

This rule now takes the string entered as the subdomain, and redirects the user. So if you typed in http://dvd.yourdomain.com, it would redirect you to http://www.yourdomain.com/dvd. To redirect it to a profile, you just add whatever the link is then output the name with %1. So, it could be: http://www.yourdomain.com/profile.php?u=%1. This would turn http://dvd.yourdomain.com into http://www.yourdomain.com/profile.php?u=dvd. Cool, no?

That’s all there really is to it. Servers are picky, so you may need to dress it up some.

Step 4: Test!

Test it and see if it works. If it doesn’t, try doing a google search for “subdomain mod_rewrite.” Also, feel free to ask questions. It took me six hours to get this working on my site, so if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. The way I view is you’re writing a haiku. It takes hours to come up with a proper haiku (sometimes years!), and that’s only seventeen total syllables. Here, we’re also adding only three lines, but it’s getting the rhythm right in those lines that counts.

Posted in mod_rewrite