NeutralAxis

I’ve been trying to get this blog adjusted to use “pretty” permalinks, so the URL of posts are readable, and its just not working.  It shouldn’t be this difficult.  [Update: See resolution after the link]

[Update:  Problem solved.  Everything in my original post was correct, but I didn't have Apache's httpd.conf file configured correctly.  After adding the following to httpd.conf and restarting Apache it began following the instruction that .htaccess was giving it.

<Directory /path/to/blogroot>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

I still don't understand how .htaccess works.

end Update]

The two keys to doing it, as best as I can tell, are making sure mod_rewrite is enabled for Apache, and making sure .htaccess gets modified in the wordpress root folder.  I’ve verified both, but I still get File Not Found errors when I make a new post and try to go to it.  What I don’t understand is how the modifications to .htaccess are supposed to work.  No matter what alternative structure I choose for the permalink, the guts of .htaccess don’t change.

Set to the default structure, .htaccess is

# BEGIN WordPress
# END WordPress

When the structure is changed it becomes.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

No matter what non-default structure I use, whether its /year/month/day/postname, or /year/month/postname, or /monkey/pinata/postname, that .htaccess file doesn’t change.  Neither does the index.php file mentioned within it.  So how is it supposed to work?