After reporting weirdness last week I finally sat down with a completely clean and virgin install of WordPress 2.3.2 and traced what happens when you make a permalink request for a non-existent URL.
Here are two sets of URLs to use as examples and context:

These are valid URLs:

http://site.org/archives/101
http://site.org/page-name

These are _not_ valid URLs:

http://site.org/archivezorz/101
http://site.org/favicon.ico

Valid URLs get parsed, the [...]

Posted January 18, 2008 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: 404, behavior, hacking, mysql, optimization, permalinks, wordpress. One Comment.

I made a mistake in changing my WordPress permalinks, but by the time I’d discovered it my blog had already been indexed. Fixing the permalinks meant breaking those indexed URLs, leading to a bad user experience, but leaving them as is wasn’t really an option.
Last night, after getting 404′d while using Google to search my [...]

Posted April 19, 2007 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: 404, apache rewrite, mod_rewrite, permalinks, redirect, rewrite, rewrite rules, wordpress. 7 Comments.