Following this post of mine, asking for help, and advice regarding the publishing, and uploading of local images from my MacBook to my WordPress, Self Hosted Blog, NokiaDNA, I received much help from readers who contacted me via twitter. Some very helpful folk even took a look at my server side of things, checking each and every file there for a possible conflict.

Basically, Blogo, Qumana, and MarsEdit, all very good Mac desktop remote publishing solutions all failed to publish to my blog whenever I added a local image from my MacBook. They all successfully published when inserting flickr, or any other imager HTML, it was just when I was trying to add an image that was actually stored locally on my Mac.

For a full breakdown of the issues I was experiencing, and the error codes that I were getting, head over to my earlier post here, which documents this in great detail. I hope that this information here, and in that post offer some help to any other blogger that may come across the same problem.

I removed the following two lines from my .htaccess file……

AuthName nokiadna.comAuthUserFile /home/mickyfin/publichtml/vtipvt/service.pwdAuthGroupFile /home/mickyfin/publichtml/vtipvt/service.grp

Then added the following, switching ModSecurity OFF command script.

SecFilterEngine OffSecFilterScanPOST Off

Now after carrying out the above, I tried all three Mac desktop clients, and they all worked perfectly, I was over joyed, in fact, Im still grinning from finally fixing my hair pulling issue. I was not sure which of the two steps above actually fixed my problem, so returned to my cPanel, where I was going to try and remove the ModSecurity script I added, however, upon opening my .htaccess file in code editor, I noticed those two lines I had previously removed had somehow came back, and was showing in the very place I had removed them from.

So long story short, the problem I was experiencing was indeed with my ModSecurity, so I have now left my .htaccess file well alone.

I would like to thank the following people for assisting me through these turbulent times, where I was venturing into unknown territory of my Blogs backend, and the server side of things.

Gareth, Politicspenguin who I shared a detailed Skype chat with talking about my issues. Gareth spent many hours working on my server side of things whilst I were sleeping. Gareth also set me up with an account over on his blog, politicspenguin so I could I could test publishing from my remote clients to his WordPress self hosted blog.

Rob, Creativegeek who also helped out behind the scenes for many hours, trying this, and that, he set up two separate macs, and tested various things on each, and a lot of head scratching was going on with me and Rob via our MSN chat.

Steven Smith, Steve set me up wihth a completely fresh server install, and WordPress installation, and again, much head scratching went on, and we were still really confused on what on earth was causing the conflict. Steve spent Easter Sunday recently helping me through all these issues, and spend ages reinstalling everything for me.

David Gilson, for spending hours and hours going over all my server configurations, trying different setups, and experimenting with various scripts.

Steve Richardson, who was introduced to me by the lovely Michelle via twitter. Steve mentioned my .htaccess file was the problem, and it was Ste’s comment that got me reading, and learning about code, and .htaccess file configurations which in return lead me to finally finding a ModSecurity fix for a similar problem, here.

John from Urban Giraffe, for posting this really helpful post on his blog, which is also about the random 406 error many blogger face from time to time, and although it wasn’t directly the same issue I was experiencing, it was this blogpost which I found the ModSecurity “OFF” script, so thanks John.!

Thanks again to all those mentioned above, and thanks again to every single one of you, my twitter followers for your patients during the testing period of my server issues, I cannot apologize enough for flooding your timelines whilst working. Next time I work on my site, I will be sure to switch off twitter statuses, I promise.!