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I'm a self-taught PHP scripter (since 2005) with a dynamically generated Website for which I need a variety of rewrite and redirect statements in order to "get right with Google." I've read much online info that indicates that I can accomplish this best by altering my .htmaccess file -- however every time I make a change to my htmaccess file (even if I'm just cutting-and-pasting a line containing a redirect instruction) my whole site seems to go down.
But the weirdest part is that, almost every time that I try to re-upload an htmaccess file that WAS originally working (before I started trying changes), the original file no longer works after I re-upload it -- yet it's the very same htmaccess file that was working before I started trying new versions of that file. (I've even tried setting my FETCH FTP client specifically to TEXT so that it will upload the htmaccess file in ASCII -- even though it should automatically upload correctly without that -- but the newly uploaded htmaccess file no longer seems to work.)
Is there some reason why htmaccess seems so incredibly temperamental in its actions like this? I'm curious, because much of the online tutorial stuff makes it sound straightforward. I have even hired a programmer to help me write some rewrite lines in my main directory htmaccess file, and it is has not been a quick matter for her to make successful changes to that file either. I think she, too, thought it would be, but she ended up needing several hours to tweak the thing into working properly. And yet, as I say, all the tutorials are written as if there are no special problems related to changing one's htmaccess files.
My questions are:
1) Is there anything I'm overlooking that might be making this htmaccess business more difficult than it needs to be?
2) What's a good place or resource for me to really learn this htmaccess business and related Apache server topics?
Thanks
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