Out of Egypt:

messing around with redirects and php includes

I'm trying to add another feed to my blog: this one showing my recent UrbanMinistry.org blog posts. However, I didn't want to slow the page load time any further, since it's already causing problems, so I thought I'd change my Feedburner feeds (del.icio.us and, now, UrbanMinistry.org) over to use the PHP include method.

But this, of course, involved making my index page into a PHP page, and I don't know how to write a proper PHP header. So I've got the PHP index up now (visible here), but it seems not to be displaying properly, since there's already an index.html in the folder. Is there any way I can get rid of that?

I tried using a 301 redirect in an .htaccess file, but it was causing a 500 error on the server. I don't think that the permissions on the Covblogs server are set to allow me to do that (understandably, as an .htaccess file is pretty powerful stuff).

I could change the index.html to a client-side redirect (either through the <meta> command or JavaScript), but I'd really rather not do that, but for SEO reasons and just general courtesy. What do y'all think?

UPDATE: Also, the footer should now be in the right place, and categories should appear on the individual entry pages. If these things look off to you (esp. in IE), please let me know.