One year ago today Amy and I officially filed our LLC for Height & Hands. While there was a considerable amount of work that preceded our filing, it seems like today is a good day to celebrate one full year of hard work and a enough success to sustain a comfortable life on our own terms.

We’ve been lucky to have more ups than downs. Great clients, helpful friends, and a thriving Boston web community have been invaluable. Although there have been occasions where we had to make some tough decisions, I’m very proud of our little business and am looking forward to things to come.

No foolin’.

The trouble arose this morning when a client informed me that her site, running on ExpressionEngine v2.4, was getting a 404 error when a third party site was trying to feature a post. The site in question was trying to pull the EE url into an iframe via a query string. Query strings typically look something like this: http://server/path/program?query_string.

I spent a lot of time poking around looking for an .htaccess trick to get the server to accept the query string but it turned out I was barking up the wrong tree. It was actually quite an easy fix once I found it in the ExpressionEngine forums.

Step One

Make sure you’re using the recommended .htaccess code from the ExpressionEngine User Guide, only if you’re trying to remove index.php from your URLs, which is highly recommended.

Step Two

The second and most important step lies in the URI protocol section of the EE config file which can be found in system > expressionengine > config > config.php

You’ll need to change: $config['uri_protocol'] = 'AUTO';

To this: $config['uri_protocol'] = 'PATH_INFO';

Step Three

Celebrate.

Today sites all over the internet are blacking out in protest of two exceptionally poor pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). If you’re unfamiliar with these issues, you’d do well to educate your self on the bills.

Is it baffling to you how these bills are even being considered while there are more pressing issues at hand – an unemployment rate of 8.5%, energy independence and a broken Social Security system? Bills like SOPA and PIPA are indicative of a much larger problem: the U.S. Congress is being lobbied by people and corporations who have only their own well-being at heart.

Lobbying is a multibillion dollar industry designed to advance the interests of the groups and individuals with the most money. You may ask yourself, “how is lobbying legal?” as I have asked myself many times before. Currently it is protected by the right to petition in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. While the intentions of the right to petition are good — giving people and corporations the right to make a complaint to, or seek the assistance of, one’s government without fear of punishment or reprisals — lobbying should no longer be protected. The practice has been perverted to the point where it is corrupting our government.

So while you’re calling your representatives to speak out against SOPA and PIPA, let them know that reforms to lobbying and campaign financing should be among their top priorities.

No matter what your political views are, I’m sure we can all agree that we deserve a government that works for the people and the country as a whole – not one that is on the take from multinational corporations trying to subvert the system for their own gain.