Technical

Going public, keeping private–with .htaccess

Ever since I went public with the garden blog residing in a subfolder of this server account, I’ve been dogged with issues trying to keep the main domain private and the subdomain public.

The solution finally manifested itself after I lost access to both domains after an IP change. Because the main domain only responded to specific IP requests via the .htaccess file, I had to make some changes. An .htaccess file in the subdomain directory with the appropriate lines finally resolved the issue.

For the main domain, I limited access to my IP address with the following:

# ALLOW ONLY SPECIFIC IPs
<Limit GET POST PUT>
 Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
</Limit>

I also had to permit public access to certain file-types, i.e. picture files, since my subdomain used the same WordPress content directory as the main domain:

# Allow only certain file types
<FilesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|mp3|mpg|mp4|mov|wav|wmv|png|gif|swf|css|js)$">
Allow from All
</FilesMatch>

For the subdomain, I permitted the public GET, POST and PUT permissions:

# allow public access
<Limit GET POST PUT>
order allow,deny
allow from all 
</Limit>

With the above, I retained privacy of my main domain, but gave public access to the subdomain served from a subfolder of the main WordPress site.

Ye Olde Garden

Is that rain, Virginia?

Yes, that stuff falling out of the sky in buckets is rain. After more than a month without it, it almost seemed like some landscape on an alien planet as I watched it pour all over my garden. What a relief! The patchy brown bermuda grass lawn will love this, and everything that needed a drink will get a good soaking. Timing is everything…I had just installed a soaker hose in the front flower bed this past weekend. Those azaleas need some serious help.

Next up, humidity!

Ye Olde Garden

Day 34: Ouch!

One month of straight 100+ degree weather. The paucity of blog posts here is directly related to how much time I’ve been spending in the garden–which amounts to the least number of hours possible.

The man and I did spend a few hours this past Saturday morning weeding and cleaning out the front flower bed. We took stock of our ailing azaleas and parched lawn, gave them all a good soaking, before going back into hiding. However, it seems that soaking every other day is not helping our plants or our lawn. Though I’m loathed to see our water bill for every day sprinkler watering, that may be our only recourse to keeping things alive. That, and more cedar mulch.

So after weeding, I took stock of our garden and found that the heuchera are all dried up, the Autumn Embers azaleas extremely dehydrated, and my once-thriving rosemary plant with one foot in the grave. Of course the rosemary suffered due to an over-abundance of watering, spawning a fungus killing off its roots. One of my salvia greggiis (Royal Raspberry) wasn’t immune to the poor weather either, having lost most of its top growth.

My poor Salsa Asiatic jasmines have turned brown with leaf burn if they’re not already dead. Because of their young neighbors died off in the heat, they lost some valuable shade in the process. Other potted plants fare well only with daily watering. They would prosper if I increased their watering to twice daily, but my reluctance to stand in the heat has seen me outside only once a day.

Yesterday as I was watering the courtyard, I did find that the Shu ornamental pepper had begun dropping its fruit, one of the golden oreganos in the cinderblock wall had gotten burnt, and the aster in the blue bed has started blooming sporadically. Also, the eggplant has retained its one flower so far, but I’m not sure if I should expect any fruit.

The upside to this extreme weather is that I haven’t gotten bitten once. Mosquitoes must be thrown off by all the ambient heat and lack of human CO2 to find a host to feed on.