Eliot, Eliott, Elliot, and Elliott s of the World UNITE!
I got the following cool email today:
I just stumbled on to your blog via someone’s installation of your hashcash plugin. I was wondering what in the world hash cash was and then got distracted by your blog (that I had to read via Google’s cache because your site seems to be unreachable this morning). I just had to email someone who has (almost) the same name as me. And, we also share a similar goal! One of my goals in life is to be known as just “Eliot” without the use of my last name. I love how infrequently I meet other Eliot’s (or Elliot’s or Elliott’s) and I’ve even rarely met someone who knew another Eliot (or Elliot or Elliott). I want to take advantage of that and become like Madonna or Prince or Beck. A one-name wonder, you might say.
Yes, being named Elliott is indeed pretty cool. We’re not named for ET–think T.S. Eliot. And, even cooler, is that any of us can be effectively named E(l+)iot(+) without difficulty. Elllliotttttttttts of the world, unite!
For those of you who don’t know the origin or history of the name Eliot, try this list of people by surname El from wikipedia, or read about how Eliot derives from Hebrew Elijah, meaning “The Lord is my God.”
And, contrary to popular opinion, it’s a statistically significant American name:
Elliot is a common male first name, ranking 582 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. Elliot is a very popular surname, ranking 1841 out of 88799 for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census.
Update: Did you know that Elyot is another variant of this name? It’s a rare spelling from the 16th century!
Permalinks Down
Something changed at the host (1and1), and all permalinks are not working. I’ve contacted their support… we’ll see how fast this gets resolved. Hopefully they just installed a new apache or something and it’ll kick in in minutes…
Update:
Everything should be back to normal now. Before my .htaccess was giving a lot of 404 errors, and none of the mod_rewrite rules were working. It turns out that 1and1 (without telling me) enabled the apache Multiviews setting, which plays havoc with the rewrite rules:
RewriteRule ^archives/…$ /wp/index.php?… [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/$ /wp/archives.php
Since I also had a file called archives.php, Apache couldn’t decide whether to apply the rewrite rules in .htaccess or the multiviews logic that said all /archives/ were really archives.php. The solution? Disabling MultiViews in this directory by adding this line to the .htaccess file:
Options -MultiViews
A little MOD_REWRITE fun
Due to the resurrection of my GLAT post, I wrote a redirect to send visitors looking for the old one over to the new one. You can just add the following mod_rewrite rules to your .htaccess:
# For the GLAT post
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} postid=106
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ elliottback.com/?blah…) until I realized it was in the QUERY_STRING variable…