The solution was to disable the “canonical URL redirection”, by installing this plugin:

http://txfx.net/files/wordpress/disable-canonical-redirects.phps

To install the plugin, just download the file, copy it to the plugins folder and activate it via the administration panel. This solution assumes you still have access to the administration panel.

This was helpful:

http://enlightenedwebmastery.com/how-to-fix-the-redirect-loop-error-in-wordpress

and this:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/redirect-loop-problem

The full Bernie story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7AiMoOSxlk

It is very unpleasant to have a website mugged, or “hacked”, for no reason at all but the display of the “signatures” of the abusers.
After all these years, here are some tips.

(1)

If you have an ASP.NET web.config global file, yet the system says it can NOT find a valid web.config for a particular application, it might be because of wrong permissions on that app’s file system containing folder.

Since I run IIS6, this page was helpful:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317955/

It basically says: “add the NETWORK SERVICE user to the app’s folder”.

Indeed, every .NET app folder must allow the “NETWORK SERVICE” user with the permissions:
- read
- read and execute
- list folder contents

(2)

In IIS6 the user IUSR_TEMPLATE represents an anonymous web visitor and so must be available for all resources to be made public on the WWW.

Generally, this user should only have READ permits and nothing else, for all resources.

If some particular folders require writing, give this user READ and WRITE permits, but *never* WRITE and EXECUTE.

Ideally, the WRITE permit should only be given to out-of-reach-of-the-web-server folders, meaning locations that are nowhere in the tree being made public by IIS, Apache or whatever the http server. But this isn’t always possible: most Content Management Systems (CMSs) will require at least one writable public folder, for example to where bloggers can upload pictures – just follow the minimal approach and the *never* WRITE and EXECUTE rule.

(3)

For read-only web presences, if you strictly follow the minimal rule, giving nothing but the READ permit to the web visitor user and no other permits to no other users at all, you’ll end up with a very secure site, but with some annoyances, e.g. FTP uploading contents will fail probably with a “450 can’t access file” error.

In Windows, you can easily fix it by giving “full control” to the SYSTEM user at some entry point.

(4)

Some CMSs that support themes, like Worpress, might display a blank page after being moved or copied. One very simple solution is to install a new theme, activate it, then return to the original.

As únicas perguntas de configuração do blog são as credenciais (login/password) e a “server API URL”.

Assim as possibilidades de configuração são extremamente limitadas, como (1) não poder escolher-se o porto de comunicações e (2) não poder indicar-se o destino de binários.
As hiperligações também não são automáticas, sendo estes últimos pontos desvantagens, relativamente ao software que tenho utilizado.

Uma VANTAGEM é a inclusão de imagens, por simples copy/paste… mas é uma vantagem com restrições: acontece que a imagem copiada para o clipboard é despejada para uma directoria temporária (c:\temp, no meu caso) e depois uploaded para o blog system, sem qualquer alteração da sua origem; isto quer dizer, que o HTML vai referir um endereço do estilo “file://c:/temp/file.jpg”, que não tem validade futura, nem a partir de qualquer localização externa ao sistema de ficheiros local…

Carregando o post produzido pelo ScribeFire via BlogJet, este último trata de corrigi-lo e fazer o upload para a localização configurada para binários, pelo que acontece simbiose: sozinho, o BlogJet não permite o copy/paste directo de imagens, para posts, obrigando ao passo extra de as guardar explicitamente em ficheiro.

Por exemplo, eis a imagem de satélite de accuweather.com, para Portugal, para hoje (era dia 20070808), colhida de uma página aberta num dos tabs, no momento em que escrevia.

Instalar ScribeFire (ou fazer right-click, guardar o ficheiro .xpi no sistema de ficheiros local, depois fazer file/open a partir do Firefox).

With IIS 6, things aren’t so easy.

The system running IIS6 should have “simple file sharing” disabled. Such option allows the “security” and the “web sharing” tabs to appear, on the dialog box that shows, when selecting “folder properties”.

Knowing this, after OVERWRITING all WordPress files, as if upgrading WordPress on IIS 5, to upgrade WordPress on IIS 6, just follow the next six steps.

Step #1 – Locate the WordPress folder on the local file system (for example, c:\webs\site\wordpress);
Step #2 – Choose properties (ALT+ENTER) for that folder.
Step #3 – On the security tab, select the “Internet Guest Account”, then click the button “advanced”.

WordPress upgrade on IIS 6 – Picture 1 of 5 – select the “Internet Guest Account”, then click the “Advanced” button.

WordPress upgrade on IIS 6 – Picture 2 of 5 – Check both the checkboxes, then press ok.

Step #4 – As shown on the picture above, select both check boxes, to (1) allow inheritable permissions from the parent folder, and (2) to replace the previous permissions, everywhere down the tree. Then, press OK.

WordPress upgrade on IIS 6 – Picture 3 of 5

Step #5 – Point the Internet browser to the site’s WordPress URL (for example, http://arturmarques.com/wordpress) and follow the instructions on screen.
As the image above shows, you’ll first have to choose to upgrade the database.

WordPress upgrade on IIS 6 – Picture 4 of 5 – Upgrade goes on

After upgrading the database, some files will also be updated.

WordPress upgrade on IIS 6 – Picture 5 of 5 – The conclusion

Step #6 (final) – After a few seconds, the upgrade is done. Just visit your WordPress site to confirm.

I hope this guidance can help someone who gets stuck on something so simple, yet with the potential to cause a major headache.

UPDATE: some WordPress upgrades change the database structure. If so, it will be needed to upgrade the database, by visiting http://server/path/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php
where server and path should be replaced by proper values, specific to each installation.

For example, here at home, the upgrade can be invoked the following way:

http://localhost/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php

For example, I was “group posting” to arturmarques.com and to a http server on my Intranet (named “X”).
The <img src=”something”> HTML would always mention X, no matter the server.

I had to edit the many posts who had wrong URLs for the images. This huge error was hard to spot, because I did most browsing tests from the X machine, meaning that the images were still showing, because they were available from the Intranet. Only when testing from outside the Intranet, I realized my mistake.

When fixing the mistake, I found another BlogJet annoyance: each closing bracket was being forward’slashed.
For example <tag bla bla> was being transformed in <tag bla bla />. This caused no HTML parsing errors, but did not correspond to the post’s original HTML, so I also edited the affected posts, only to discover that the HTML that gets posted by BlogJet is NOT exactly what the user types – again, the slash phenomenon happens, although it doesn’t break the pages.

Because of multiple edits, I had posts with several slashes like “<tag bla bla bla / / />” – this one corresponds to a twice edited post (one slash on creation; one extra slash per edit).

Doing the text find/replace operation to transform, for example, “/ / / />” in “>” was NOT easy!
My default text editor (NoteTab Light 4.95) didn’t detect the right character set, so when doing a simple copy paste from BlogJet’s HTML view, the Portuguese characters got all messed up.

Because of this, I started using EditPad Light. This free editor allows to easily change the document’s character set.
I found that BlogJet’s HTML is UTF-8. So, setting EditPad to UTF-8, allows direct copy/paste from BlogJet even for non english characters.

Quite a ride. I am sorry if you visited the website and found (only) the “ALT” description for pictures… It is fixed – I hope.

This problem was happening with my private blog: when using the “almost spring 1.2” theme, some categories with posts were NOT listed; the problem went away when reverting to the “Wordpress Default 1.5” presentation.

After trying to figure out why this happened, I came to the conclusion that when a category X has a parent PX, and the corresponding posts are categorized only as X and not as X + PX, then most WordPress themes will just not list X, assuming that if the parent PX has no entries, than X must be empty too… which might not be the case.

I can understand this logic, but I can also understand that some users build hierarchies of categories, yet they prefer to not check the entire logical branch, when posting.

There is a workaround, for this problem: to force a “post timestamp”.

(2) you can’t upload files to the database. If you try to upload, you’ll get the error “WordPress database error: [Field 'post_content_filtered' doesn't have a default value]“.

I don’t know of a workaround for this problem.

These problems look like bugs, related to how WordPress 2.0 interacts with MySQL 5. If one uses MySQL 4, these specific issues shouldn’t arise.

Other people have identified these bugs. For (1) check here. For (2) check here.

Unfortunately, installing WordPress on Windows 2003 + IIS6, was not as easy as it should have been. IIS6 is so different from IIS5 – the web server that comes with Windows XP Pro – that people used to deploy PHP applications on that platform, might be surprised and defeated with the new challenges… Just search the Internet for sentences like “running PHP5 on Windows 2003 Server” and you’ll find loads of requests for help.
In fact, none of the solutions I found were 100% effective – that is why I will be publishing a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it. No one deserves to spend frustrating time, because of IIS6′s high security demands and low quality feedback, when something isn’t right.

I’ll edit this post (my first WordPress post!), to point that tutorial, when available.