Wodpress Help Please - Permalinks

Zascar

I installed wordpress and have get up a blog on my website.

At the moment my permalinks are as default. e.g: www.zascar.com/blog/?p=16
I want them to be as simple as possible: www.zascar.com/blog/link-name-here
(this also works better for search engine optimisation also...)
However when I change them in the Permalinks Options and test it, I get a 'Page Cannot Be Displayed' when I click on the link. All it says is "You should update your .htaccess now".

I've looked in the help section but I don't really understand how to fix this, can anyone try to explain please?
Thanks

Illkillya

Create an empty file called .htaccess, upload to your root directory on your webspace and chmod to 666. Change permalink structure from ?p=123 to whatever you want and wordpress will do the rest.

Zascar

Illkillya wrote:

chmod to 666.

Sorry no idea what that means, can you please explain? Do I add this text tot he .htaccess file?

I have a .htaccess file in the ../blog directory, but it was blank. What do i put in it?
Thanks for your help.

Zascar

I just noticed at the bottom of the wordpress options page it says:

If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

I did this and it worked!
Cheers

Illkillya

chmod 666 is changing the file to allow read and write access. You can do this in an ftp client. All it is doing really is allowing Wordpress to write to the file itself, but it would have just written what you put in manually, so your way is fine too.