I was struggling with a problem that I couldn’t upload media files to my blog — which I host myself on a Debian box in a multi-site configuration. When I tried to do so I got an error message saying that WordPress couldn’t write to the directory. Actually I had this very problem since 2005 when I started this blog — I never took the time to really investigate it (but used the work-around to refer to static content I manually uploaded to my web-server document directory)… 😉

Now that my wife wanted to start blogging, I finally had a good reason to fix this issue. It took me about an hour, and it was done. What I had to do was just two entries in my admin’s Settings (I might not have set up WordPress cleanly when I started it, so you might not have to manually set this) as follows:

And then I needed one Alias in my Apache configuration to redirect the URL prefix to a directory under my web-server document root:

# "Intercepts" files prefix and redirect to "local" (user's) directory
Alias /blog/files /home/rabe/var/www/bergs.biz/blog/files
# This is the prefix to the root of my blog
Alias /blog /usr/share/wordpress

That’s it! Sometimes things are so easy, and it only takes a short while to fix them… 😉