My Setup

As this screenshot shows, I only use a handful of add-ons at a time. These buttons allow me to clear the DNS/Cookies/Cache for whichever site I’m on when I click it. Very very helpful for me as a web designer. The 4th button there is just a restart button. Other than those, Firebug, YSlow, LastPass, and Web Developer are the only ones I always use regularly.

I like the idea of the last.fm but it’s not as powerful as the site, which is awesome. Lately I’ve been listening to Kings of Leon Radio…

Slow Firefox

The more add-ons you have, disabled or not, the slower Firefox is. (unless you are running your profile folder in TMPFS). Also, bookmarks and settings like that have a performance hit. I have been using Firefox since it launched way back when, and I have always kept my bookmarks when moving to new machines and new installations.. So with over 5 thousand bookmarks I finally did some debugging and discovered that was a huge cause of Firefox acting slow. Now I am trying to migrate them all over to Google’s Gmarks, which knowing Google will be awesome eventually.

Multiple Firefox Installations, Sorta

The solution to all these problems is to use separate Firefox profiles which use separate folders to store your profile-specific extensions and settings. So I have profiles with upwards of 40 Addons installed and enabled, and another profile that is built for speed… It’s very very slow to be running Firebug and have multiple tabs open.. You can use the profilemanager to load them specific profiles from the command line. I personally use separate icons on my Windows Quick Launch that I just modified the shortcut pointing to firefox to also have the profile commandline. Note also that you can have multiple profiles open and running simultaneously.. This lets you do some crazy networking and other random hacks like having many Firefox instances running each of which is configured to use a separate SOCKS Proxy or network interface, so you can really open up those pipes for some intense txrx.

You can do some very powerful things with Firefox that most people are unaware of, if you are interested start with these:

• Setting up an extension development environment
• Firefox Command Line Options

About This Collection

Web Development Add-ons for Advanced Web Developers. I personally use these to work on Sites, Servers, WordPress, Javascript, PHP, CSS, XHTML, validation, page-loading, SEO, optimizing, and much more. Add this collection.

Created by:AskApache

Updated:September 22, 2009

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Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers originally appeared on AskApache.

Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..

For a better handle on the way I like to structure web site directories, see Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management but note it is a bit outdated compared to what I’m doing now. I don’t have the luxury of using only one type of server, or hosting provider anymore, so I have been working towards making things even more portable in order to move from host to host from server to server without issues i.e. my portable .bash_profile.

So I’ve been basically experimenting various ways to accomplish that and thought I would share what I am currently doing for my benefit and hopefully get some input. All of my WP installs run the development version, and one main idea with my setups is that upgrading is automated. So I really keep the WordPress install clean and use plugins and wp-config.php to do all the customization.

• Portability – Hands-free upgrades and easy to move
• Security – Additional security and protection
• Speed – Less CPU and Disk I/O
• Customization – All my favorite customizations

wp-config.php

These are the main settings I use.. Seriously this is more like an interactive article, because to understand it you will need to do some code grepping. You may want to grab a jolt.

ASKAPACHE_ROOT

The ASKAPACHE_ROOT variable is just a better way for me to be able to include and access all the different files in my site tree. For instance, in my non-wp php files, I can do this:

!defined('ASKAPACHE_ROOT') && require $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/wp-config.php';
include(ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/includes/custom-download.inc.php');

ASKAPACHE_LOCK

This is one of my all-time favorite hacks, that I think is one of the most useful methods I employ as a web developer. This allows me to use far-future-expire headers for optimum caching, while still forcing browsers to re-validate every day or so automatically, or forcing them to re-validate whenever I change the suffix. This takes advantage of the mod_rewrite trick that I use on EVERY site I run, definately worth learning. Because I practice best-practice web-standards, for every web site I create a single css file and javascript file, which I then add to the template like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://z.askapache.com/c/apache-0<?php echo ASKAPACHE_LOCK?>.css" />
<script src="http://z.askapache.com/j/apache-0<?php echo ASKAPACHE_LOCK;?>.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<?php
/**
 * The base configurations of the WordPress.
 *
 * This file has the following configurations: MySQL settings, Table Prefix,
 * Secret Keys, WordPress Language, and ABSPATH. You can find more information by
 * visiting {@link http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php Editing
 * wp-config.php} Codex page. You can get the MySQL settings from your web host.
 *
 * This file is used by the wp-config.php creation script during the
 * installation. You don't have to use the web site, you can just copy this file
 * to "wp-config.php" and fill in the values.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 */
/* http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php */
 
/** /home/liet/askapache.com */
!defined('ASKAPACHE_ROOT') && define('ASKAPACHE_ROOT', str_replace('/htdocs','', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
 
/** The 008 at the end is for manual tweaking.  time() returns seconds since '00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC'. */
// http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/mod_rewrite-fix-for-caching-updated-files.html
!defined('ASKAPACHE_LOCK') && define(ASKAPACHE_LOCK', substr(time(),0,5).'008'); // 12533001
 
/** absolute path to the Wordpress directory */
!defined('ABSPATH') && define('ABSPATH', ASKAPACHE_ROOT .'/htdocs/');
 
/**
 * WP_SITEURL, defined since WordPress Version 2.2, allows the WordPress address (URL) to be defined. The valued defined is the address where your WordPress core files reside.
 * It should include the http:// part too. Do not put a slash "/" at the end.
 * Setting this value in wp-config.php overrides the wp_options table value for siteurl and disables the WordPress address (URL) field in the Administration > Settings > General panel.
 */
!defined('WP_SITEURL') && define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
 
/**
 * WP_HOME is another wp-config.php option added in WordPress Version 2.2. Similar to WP_SITEURL,
 * WP_HOME overrides the wp_options table value for home but does not change it permanently.
 * home is the address you want people to type in their browser to reach your WordPress blog. It should include the http:// part. Also, do not put a slash "/" at the end.
 */
!defined('WP_HOME') && define('WP_HOME', WP_SITEURL);
 
/** no trailing slash, full paths only */
!defined('WP_CONTENT_DIR') && define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content' );
 
// full url - WP_CONTENT_DIR is defined further up
!defined('WP_CONTENT_URL') && define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', WP_SITEURL . '/wp-content');
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.6.0 */
// full path, no trailing slash
!defined('WP_PLUGIN_DIR') && define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/plugins' );
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.6.0 */
// full url, no trailing slash
!defined('WP_PLUGIN_URL') && define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', WP_CONTENT_URL . '/plugins' );
 
/** Allows for the plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.1.0 */
// Relative to ABSPATH.  For back compat.
//!defined('PLUGINDIR') && define( 'PLUGINDIR', 'wp-content/plugins' );
 
/** Number of autosaves to save. TRUE is default and enables post revisions, FALSE disables revisions completely. */
!defined('WP_POST_REVISIONS') && define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 150);
 
/* ini_set('memory_limit', WP_MEMORY_LIMIT); */
!defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') && define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
 
/** Only check at this interval for new messages. Default is 5min */
/** @since 2.9  */
!defined('WP_MAIL_INTERVAL') && define('WP_MAIL_INTERVAL', 3600); // 1 hour
 
/** Saves updated post values to post from edit window every x seconds. (default 60)
 * When editing a post, WordPress uses Ajax to auto-save revisions to the post as you edit. You may want to increase this setting for longer delays in between auto-saves, or decrease the setting to make sure you never lose changes.
 * @since 2.5.0 */
!defined( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL' ) && define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60 );
 
/** @since 2.9.0  */
/** Permanently deletes posts, pages, attachments, and comments which have been in the trash for EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS. */
!defined( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS' ) && define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 300 );

Debugging WordPress

One of my secrets for getting really good at this stuff is to master debugging. There is really not ever a time when I am working on a site that I don’t have color-highlighted logs scrolling automatically in an ssh window. It’s really almost impossible to fix problems with wordpress or do any kind of advanced anything without being able to view debugging info. At first I relied heavily on a custom php.ini being available on the server, but after having to deal with many hosts who don’t allow php.ini files I now rely completely on setting values using ini_set for ultimate portability. Detailed towards the end of this article and is also included in this wp-config.php

/**#@+
 * DEBUGGING STUFF
 */
/** display of notices during development. if false, error_reporting is E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_USER_ERROR | E_USER_WARNING | E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR otherwise E_ALL */
!defined('WP_DEBUG') && define('WP_DEBUG', false);
 
/** The SAVEQUERIES definition saves the database queries to a array and that array can be displayed to help analyze those queries.
 *  The information saves each query, what function called it, and how long that query took to execute.  */
!defined('SAVE_QUERIES') && define('SAVE_QUERIES', WP_DEBUG);
 
!defined('ACTION_DEBUG') && define('ACTION_DEBUG', WP_DEBUG);
 
/** This will allow you to edit the scriptname.dev.js files in the wp-includes/js and wp-admin/js directories.  */
!defined('SCRIPT_DEBUG') && define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', WP_DEBUG);

 
/** Add define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); to enable php debug logging to WP_CONTENT_DIR/debug.log */
//!defined('WP_DEBUG_LOG') && define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
 
/** This determines whether errors should be printed to the screen as part of the output or if they should be hidden from the user.
 *  Add define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false); to wp-config.php to use the globally configured setting for display_errors and not force it to On */
!defined('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY') && define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);

Ultimate Security Tweaks

Well, ultimate for WP’s built-in keys and password functions, this is all for wp-config.php keep in mind. This is a very neccessary and recommended step, and is one of the only things I modify for each new installation.

Security KEYS

If like me you are familiar with password-cracking software like John the ripper, rainbow hash tables, l0pht-crack, etc.. then you will like to know that you can specify your own keys and salts for the encryption used by WP. They are AUTH_KEY, AUTH_SALT, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_SALT, LOGGED_IN_KEY, LOGGED_IN_SALT, NONCE_KEY, NONCE_SALT, SECRET_KEY and SECRET_SALT.

A random and long key gives you better encryption, and exponentially increasing that is using a random and long salt for the encryption. Encryptions with known salts are incredibly easy to decrypt compared to encryptions with secure salts, because the salt + key individually need to be guessed in order to find a matching hash, vs. just the key if the salt is known. See: Locating weak passwords.

A secret key is a hashing salt which makes your site harder to hack and access harder to crack by adding random elements to the password.

In simple terms, a secret key is a password with elements that make it harder to generate enough options to break through your security barriers. A password like “password” or “test” is simple and easily broken. A random, unpredictable password such as “88a7da62429ba6ad3cb3c76a09641fc” takes years to come up with the right combination.

For more information on the technical background and breakdown of secret keys and secure passwords, see:

• WordPress Support Forum – HOWTO: Set up secret keys in WordPress 2.6+
• Wikipedia’s explanation of Password Cracking

I like to use the WordPress.org secret-key service 4 times. That’s because for each key and salt I like to do: (1 key from api +random keyboard input+1 key from api).

/**#@+
 * Authentication Unique Keys.
 *
 * Change these to different unique phrases!
 * You can generate these using the {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ WordPress.org secret-key service}
 * You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies.
 * This will force all users to have to log in again.
 *
 * @since 2.6.0
 *
 * Get salt to add to hashes to help prevent attacks.
 *
 * The secret key is located in two places: the database in case the secret key
 * isn't defined in the second place, which is in the wp-config.php file. If you
 * are going to set the secret key, then you must do so in the wp-config.php
 * file.
 *
 * The secret key in the database is randomly generated and will be appended to
 * the secret key that is in wp-config.php file in some instances. It is
 * important to have the secret key defined or changed in wp-config.php.
 *
 * If you have installed WordPress 2.5 or later, then you will have the
 * SECRET_KEY defined in the wp-config.php already. You will want to change the
 * value in it because hackers will know what it is. If you have upgraded to
 * WordPress 2.5 or later version from a version before WordPress 2.5, then you
 * should add the constant to your wp-config.php file.
 *
 * Below is an example of how the SECRET_KEY constant is defined with a value.
 * You must not copy the below example and paste into your wp-config.php. If you
 * need an example, then you can have a
 * {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ secret key created} for you.
 *
 * Salting passwords helps against tools which has stored hashed values of
 * common dictionary strings. The added values makes it harder to crack if given
 * salt string is not weak.
 *
 * @since 2.5
 * @link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ Create a Secret Key for wp-config.php
 *
 * @return string Salt value from either 'SECRET_KEY' or 'secret' option
 */
define('AUTH_KEY',        'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?p[B+GR{@>{Yq`c|LnG;dvq#| %OA_cbBSU6,rICC1o/c)-|');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[Bb15baar8&R-r<[T|?(xhJJABGq+Ux+U$)-Hltp/');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',   'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[B<5n6DG|YWnJ9tY2!M1L)`{-$LW~~Ia%.uCbn!P. 41o2$Z$4');
define('NONCE_KEY',       'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[Bgu<wM*zewR0.{+m:bmrB?wj!B,4]Wo+4 Avk ApR-D?E');
define('SECRET_KEY',     'jflkhaskljdfhkljasdhflkjashd;flkjhas;djfh;kajshdflkjashdlfkjhasdlkfhal?Vp[B52ugH6muE9r4._iZwoYKUybrqLPpv|d Xr+|yrqhUE');
 
define('AUTH_SALT',        '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdm~Ky%+%~PPa5b YEmDI%U[W!-B');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmad/7o6.AU3%9o-|Kqm]+eUqr-n~:ag');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT',   '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmsLiCv@KJ{#wd(?qe(KcH3!');
define('NONCE_SALT',       '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdmG9>+wm 2)bS0Pd_+1rx0brX]ND8|');
define('SECRET_SALT',      '123423190847olqkfhladhfsldshafasdfasdf09a7f-90a87df98adfyapoiyaf9asd8f70a9s8d7f908a7sdf97W4qCdm2<>))U|sty)+4vpWooKls/^[vN');
/**#@-*/

Using SSL for Admin and Login

SSL is kinda required from my point of view, it is just way to easy to sniff data off the wire otherwise. At least with SSL you force them to use tools like burpsuite, paros proxy, webscarab, etc..

/** @since 2.6.0  */
!defined('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN') && define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
 
/** @since 2.6.0  */
!defined('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN') && define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);

Mod_Rewrite to Force SSL

This is pretty cool, it forces non-https for all urls except for /wp-admin and wp-login.php, which both require https. It also checks for the logged_in_cookie, and if that is present in the request then it doesn't force non-https. Kinda confusing if you don't have a mod_rewrite cheatsheet.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-admin|wp-login\.php).*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*wp_li_sadfsdfasdf11b361cdsdfasdfasd=.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [S=1]
 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.askapache\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
 
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(wp-admin/.*|wp-login\.php.*)\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

File System Permissions

You can get a basic and solid intro on file permissions by reading: Changing File Permissions, or you can check out some of my file permission research.

/** The permissions as octal number, usually 0644 for files, 0755 for dirs.
 *  http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
 *  if ( !$wp_filesystem->mkdir($remote_destination, FS_CHMOD_DIR) )
 */
!defined('FS_CHMOD_DIR') && define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', (0755 & ~ umask()));
!defined('FS_CHMOD_FILE') && define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', (0644 & ~ umask()));
/**#@-*/
 
/** Define the timeouts for the connections. Only available after the construct is called to allow for per-transport overriding of the default. */
//stream_set_timeout( $stream, FS_TIMEOUT );
//!defined('FS_TIMEOUT') && define('FS_TIMEOUT', 30);
 
//$this->link = @ftp_connect($this->options['hostname'], $this->options['port'], FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT);
//!defined('FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT') && define('FS_CONNECT_TIMEOUT', 30);
 
// function get_filesystem_method($args = array(), $context = false) {
//  $method = defined('FS_METHOD') ? FS_METHOD : false; //Please ensure that this is either 'direct', 'ssh', 'ftpext' or 'ftpsockets'
//!defined('FS_METHOD') && define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
 
/** These methods for the WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades try to determine the WordPress path, as reported by PHP, but symlink trickery can sometimes
 * 'muck this up' so if you know the paths to the various folders on the server, as seen via your FTP user, you can manually define them in the wp-config.php file.
 * FS_METHOD forces the filesystem method. It should only be "direct", "ssh", "ftpext", or "ftpsockets".
 * FTP_BASE is the full path to the "base" folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_CONTENT_DIR is the full path to the wp-content folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_PLUGIN_DIR is the full path to the plugins folder of the WordPress installation.
 * FTP_PUBKEY is the full path to your SSH public key.
 * FTP_PRIKEY is the full path to your SSH private key.
 * FTP_USER is either user FTP or SSH username. Most likely these are the same, but use the appropriate one for the type of update you wish to do.
 * FTP_PASS is the password for the username entered for FTP_USER. If you are using SSH public key authentication this can be omitted.
 * FTP_HOST is the hostname:port combination for your SSH/FTP server. The standard FTP port is 21 and the standard SSH port is 22.
 */
//define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext');
//define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
//define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
//define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
//define('FTP_PUBKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub');
//define('FTP_PRIKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa');
//define('FTP_USER', 'username');
//define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
//define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org:21');
 
/**
 * Block requests through the proxy.
 *
 * Those who are behind a proxy and want to prevent access to certain hosts may do so. This will
 * prevent plugins from working and core functionality, if you don't include api.wordpress.org.
 *
 * You block external URL requests by defining WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL in your wp-config.php file
 * and this will only allow localhost and your blog to make requests.
 * The constant WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS will allow additional hosts to go through for requests. The format of the
 * WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS constant is a comma separated list of hostnames to allow.
 *
 * @since 2.8.0
 * @link http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8927 Allow preventing external requests.
/** @since 2.9  */
//!defined('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL') && define( 'WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', false );
 
/*
 * The constant WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS will allow additional hosts to go through for requests. The format of the
 * WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS constant is a comma separated list of hostnames to allow.
 *
 * @since 2.8.0
 * @link http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8927 Allow preventing external requests.
 * $accessible_hosts = preg_split('|,\s*|', WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS);
 * return !in_array( $check['host'], $accessible_hosts ); //Inverse logic, If its in the array, then we can't access it.
 */
//!defined('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS') && define( 'WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'askapache.com,askapache.org' );

Cookies!

There’s always a little comfort in having non-default cookies for security (against auto-bots), and using shorter names also means smaller HTTP Packets.

The $cookie_hash is my hack to get around the fact that COOKIEHASH isn’t definable in wp-config.

/**#@+
 * COOKIES
 * Used to guarantee unique hash cookies @since 1.5 */
$cookie_hash=md5(WP_SITEURL);
 
/** Set a cookie now to see if they are supported by the browser.
 * setcookie(TEST_COOKIE, 'WP Cookie check', 0, COOKIEPATH, COOKIE_DOMAIN);
 * @since 2.3.0 */
!defined('TEST_COOKIE') && define('TEST_COOKIE', 'wp_tc');
 
/* @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('LOGGED_IN_COOKIE') && define('LOGGED_IN_COOKIE', 'wp_li_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('SECURE_AUTH_COOKIE') && define('SECURE_AUTH_COOKIE', 'wp_sa_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.5.0 */
!defined('AUTH_COOKIE') && define('AUTH_COOKIE', 'wp_a_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('PASS_COOKIE') && define('PASS_COOKIE', 'wp_p_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('USER_COOKIE') && define('USER_COOKIE', 'wp_u_' . $cookie_hash);
 
/* ok unset this var, its not needed as COOKIEHASH will have this value, but is not definable in wp-config.php */
unset($cookie_hash);
 
/** @since 1.2.0 */
!defined('COOKIEPATH') && define('COOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_HOME . '/' ) );
 
/** @since 1.5.0 */
!defined('SITECOOKIEPATH') && define('SITECOOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_SITEURL . '/' ) );
 
/** @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH') && define( 'ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', SITECOOKIEPATH . 'wp-admin' );
 
/** @since 2.6.0 */
!defined('PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH') && define( 'PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_PLUGIN_URL)  );
 
/** @since 2.0.0 */
!defined('COOKIE_DOMAIN') && define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);

/**
  * The WP_CACHE setting, if true, includes the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php.
  * For an advanced caching plugin to use, static because you would only want one
  * if ( defined('WP_CACHE') )@include WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/advanced-cache.php';
  */
!defined('WP_CACHE') && define('WP_CACHE', true);
 
/** WordPress Localized Language, defaults to en_US.
 *
 * Change this to localize WordPress.  A corresponding MO file for the chosen
 * language must be installed to wp-content/languages. For example, install
 * de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de' to enable German
 * language support. */
!defined('WPLANG') && define ('WPLANG', 'en_US');
 
/** Stores the location of the language directory. First looks for language folder in WP_CONTENT_DIR
 *   and uses that folder if it exists. Or it uses the "languages" folder in WPINC. @since 2.1.0 */
//!defined('WP_LANG_DIR') && define('WP_LANG_DIR', ABSPATH . WPINC . '/languages');
 
/** LANGDIR defines what directory the WPLANG .mo file resides. If LANGDIR is not defined WordPress looks first to wp-content/languages and then wp-includes/languages for the .mo defined by WPLANG file.  Old static relative path maintained for limited backwards compatibility - won't work in some cases*/
//!defined('LANGDIR') && define('LANGDIR', 'wp-content/languages');
 
/** Stores the location of the WordPress directory of functions, classes, and core content. @since 1.0.0 */
//!defined('WPINC') && define('WPINC', 'wp-includes');

WPMU Stuff

I personally don’t use.

/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined('WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR') && define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/mu-plugins' ); // full path, no trailing slash
 
/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined('WPMU_PLUGIN_URL') && define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_URL', WP_CONTENT_URL . '/mu-plugins' ); // full url, no trailing slash
 
/** Allows for the mu-plugins directory to be moved from the default location. @since 2.8.0 */
//!defined( 'MUPLUGINDIR' ) && define( 'MUPLUGINDIR', 'wp-content/mu-plugins' ); // Relative to ABSPATH.  For back compat.

WordPress Database

This is usually the only thing I have to manually edit when creating a new site, unless I just use the same DB and modify the $table_prefix, (farther down). I run everything I possibly can in UTF-8, but if you don’t already know alot about character sets, wow it is one of the most confusing things so you may want to save learning about that topic for another day. Otherwise the following are helpful (and show how confusing character sets are!)

• Character Sets and Collations MySQL Support
• Converting Database Character Sets
• UTF-8 character sets (UTF-8)

If you ever setup WP to use the builtin membership features, make sure you learn about the CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE constants, I’ve found them very helpful.

/**#@+
 * MySQL settings
 */
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'askapachewpblog75');
 
/** The username to access the database */
define('DB_USER', 'askapache245d');
 
/** The password for the username to access the database */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'asdfklj2340');
 
/** The hostname to connect to the database at */
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql.askapache.com');
 
/** The charset of the database */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
 
/** The collation of the database */
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8_general_ci');

$table_prefix

The $table_prefix is the value placed in the front of your database tables. Change the value if you want to use something other than wp_ for your database prefix. Typically this is changed if you are installing multiple WordPress blogs in the same database, and also for enhanced security.

Its a safe and good idea to change this value pre-installation to add more security to your WordPress blog. Exploits attempted against your WordPress blog by malicious crackers often are built with the premise that your blog uses the prefix wp_, by changing the value you mitigate some attack vectors.

/**
 * WordPress Database Table prefix.
 *
 * You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
 * prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
 */
$table_prefix  = 'ar15_';
 
/** CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE are used to designated that the user and usermeta tables normally utilized by WordPress are not used, instead these values/tables are used to store your user information. */
//!defined('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE') && define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', $table_prefix . 'my_users');
//!defined('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE') && define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', $table_prefix . 'my_usermeta');

Setup PHP Ini Settings

 
/** Turns the output of errors on or off, you really never want this on, you should only view errors by reading the log file. */
ini_set('display_errors', WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY);
 
/** Tells whether script error messages should be logged to the server's error log or error_log. */
ini_set('log_errors', 'On');
 
/** http://us.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php */
ini_set('date.timezone', 'America/Indianapolis');
 
/** Where to log php errors */
ini_set('error_log', ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/logs/php_error.log');
 
/** Set the memory limit, otherwise defaults to '32M' */
ini_set('memory_limit', WP_MEMORY_LIMIT);

Sessions are slow

So I only use sessions when I have a specific use… In this case I need sessions only when one of the tools in the /online-tools/ directory is being used. And that is for the captcha image. In the future I won’t ever use sessions.

if(preg_match( '#^/online-tools/#',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) session_start();

Include Custom Files

Sure you could use the my-hacks.php that WP allows, or you can just stick your functions in your TEMPLATEPATH/functions.php file, but they are executed only after the wp-settings.php file, which may be too late for your file.

In the past I’ve also used the auto_prepend_file settings to run my script before anything (index.php) but I ran into some issues on different hosts, and it wasn’t as portable.

This is useful because you can have a file with globally available functions that you can use in non-WP areas as well as WP areas. I am moving away from this more and more as I learn more about classes and build plugins instead for portability.

include_once ASKAPACHE_ROOT . '/includes/myfunctions.inc';
 
/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');
?>

Some Useful PHP

I am constantly trying to make my sites and code more portable, so I am using plugins alot more to accomplish things that I use to do with separate php. Here are some examples of minimal php.

add_filter("the_generator", create_function('$a','return "";'));
add_filter('the_content', create_function('$a', 'return ((is_feed())? $a."<p><a href=\"".get_permalink()."\">".get_the_title()."</a> originally appeared on ".get_bloginfo("name").".</p>" : $a);'), 99999);
add_filter('excerpt_length', create_function('$a', 'return 300;'),99);
add_filter('excerpt_more', create_function('$a', 'return "…";'),99);
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"pingback\" href=\"'.get_bloginfo('pingback_url').'\" />\n";'), 95 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"schema.rss\" href=\"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/\" />\n";'), 96 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"schema.rel\" href=\"http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/\" />\n";'), 97 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link rel=\"meta\" type=\"application/rdf+xml\" href=\"/foaf.rdf\" />\n";'), 98 );
add_action( 'wp_head', create_function('$a','echo "<link href=\"/favicon.ico\" rel=\"shortcut icon\" type=\"image/x-icon\" />\n";'), 99 );

Debugging Note

If you read this far than you probably know how important debugging is, but I sometimes like to stick the best tips deep in my articles to make sure only YOU find it. GRTFM isn’t used on this site, it’s mostly a requirement because my writing can get pretty bad.. The point, debugging is more than a crucial requirement if you want to do anything cool. Don’t worry I got you.. check my AskApache Debug Viewer Plugin from the official WP site. It’s pretty close to providing as verbose amount of information that I could possibly figure out how to get out of php, probably more than you have ever seen at least, I focused on quantity. I use it all the time on new installs as there is no setup required and it tells me advanced information about the setup of the server, hacker code for sure.

Here’s a quick function to see set global vars, I just think this is interesting code.

function askapache_global_debug(){
  global $_GET,$_POST,$_COOKIE,$_SESSION,$_ENV,$_FILES,$_SERVER,$_REQUEST,$HTTP_POST_FILES,$HTTP_POST_VARS,$HTTP_SERVER_VARS,$HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA,$HTTP_GET_VARS,$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS,$HTTP_ENV_VARS;
  $gv=create_function('$n','global $$n; ob_start(); if ( is_array($$n) && sizeof($$n)>0 && print("[{$n}]\n") ) print_r($$n);return ob_get_clean();');
  foreach (array('_GET','_POST','_COOKIE','_SESSION','_ENV','_FILES','_SERVER','_REQUEST','HTTP_POST_FILES','HTTP_POST_VARS','HTTP_SERVER_VARS','HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA','HTTP_GET_VARS','HTTP_COOKIE_VARS','HTTP_ENV_VARS') as $k)echo $gv($k);
  print_r(get_defined_constants());
}

Also check the WordPress Codex page: Editing wp-config.php

Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks originally appeared on AskApache.

The Worst Kind of People

Spammers, and Leechers. They operate like this: Let’s say you have some mp3 files on a server, and SOMEWHERE on the web there is a link to that mp3 file’s location. This includes in javascript files, css files, robots.txt files, the spammers and leechers robots check all those files looking for the type of link they are looking for. Then they try to request that file usually utilizing a number of different types of requests to get access to the file. Then they use it for personal gain, at your peril.

Some robots perform valuable services for the world wide web community, and other leeching programming is pretty cool, so not all these activities are perpetrated by nefarious spammers.

Blocking by IP COOKIE

Ok so if a link exists to your file, it is going to be requested by a robot eventually, so the way to defeat them is by doing something on your site that modifies the way a user would request it. Robots for the most part are not javascript-capable, so the most-common advanced method is to set a cookie using javascript, and then we can check for that cookie in the request for the file using mod_rewrite.

So if your site sets a cookie named fspammers, and furthermore gives that cookie a value of 445, then this is what the request sent by an HTTP Client like Firefox looks like.

GET /hotlink/lovefreedom.mp3 HTTP/1.1
Host: z.askapache.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.askapache.com/wordpress/seo-in-wordpress.html
Cookie: fspammers=455

Mod_Rewrite HTTP Headers

The mod_rewrite module has access to ALL the HTTP Headers sent in a request, so for each of the HTTP Headers in the request example above, we can use mod_rewrite to validate.

Mod_Rewrite .htaccess Example

Finally, now that everyone is on the same page about what is really going on, here is the .htaccess code that blocks any requests for anything in the /hotlink/ folder.

Here are the triggers this code blocks access based on.

1. Cookie: Checks if fspammers cookie is present, and that it has the value of 445.
2. HTTP Protocol: Checks if HTTP 1.1 is being used (many robots use 1.0)
3. Host: Checks that the HOST Requested was z.askapache.com
4. Referer: Checks for Referring site is z.askapache.com or www.askapache.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*fspammers=445.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(.*)\ HTTP/1\.1 [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^z\.askapache\.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www|z)\.askapache\.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^hotlink/.*$ - [F]</p>

Protecting Files with Advanced Mod_Rewrite Anti-Hotlinking originally appeared on AskApache.

Loading Video

PHP for shell.php

Substitue 1.1.1.1 for your IP address.. or see below for password authentication methods.

<?php
 if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] !== '1.1.1.1') die();
 ob_start();
 if (!empty($_GET['cmd'])){
 $ff=$_GET['cmd'];
 #shell_exec($ff);
 system($ff);
 #exec($ff);
 #passthru($ff);
 }
 else {
?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>PHP AJAX Shell</title>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">var CommHis=new Array();var HisP;
function doReq(_1,_2,_3){var HR=false;if(window.XMLHttpRequest){HR=new XMLHttpRequest();if(HR.overrideMimeType){HR.overrideMimeType("text/xml");}}
else{if(window.ActiveXObject){try{HR=new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");}catch(e){try{HR=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");}
catch(e){}}}}if(!HR){return false;}HR.onreadystatechange=function(){if(HR.readyState==4){
if(HR.status==200){if(_3){eval(_2+"(HR.responseXML)");}else{eval(_2+"(HR.responseText)");}}}};HR.open("GET",_1,true);HR.send(null);}
function pR(rS){var _6=document.getElementById("outt");var _7=rS.split("\n\n");
var _8=document.getElementById("cmd").value;_6.appendChild(document.createTextNode(_8));
_6.appendChild(document.createElement("br"));for(var _9 in _7){var _a=document.createElement("pre");
_a.style.display="inline";line=document.createTextNode(_7[_9]);_a.appendChild(line);_6.appendChild(_a);
_6.appendChild(document.createElement("br"));}_6.appendChild(document.createTextNode(":-> "));_6.scrollTop=_6.scrollHeight;
document.getElementById("cmd").value="";}function keyE(_b){switch(_b.keyCode){
case 13:var _c=document.getElementById("cmd").value;if(_c){CommHis[CommHis.length]=_c;HisP=CommHis.length;var _d=document.location.href+"?cmd="+escape(_c);
doReq(_d,"pR");}break;
case 38:if(HisP>0){HisP--;document.getElementById("cmd").value=CommHis[HisP];}break;
case 40:if(HisP<CommHis.length-1){HisP++;document.getElementById("cmd").value=CommHis[HisP];}break;default:break;}}
</script></head><body style="font-family:courier">
<form onsubmit="return false" style="color:#3F0;background:#000;position:relative;min-height:450px;max-height:490px">
<div id="outt" style="overflow:auto;padding:5px;height:90%;min-height:450px;max-height:490px">:-></div>
<input tabindex="1" onkeyup="keyE(event)" style="color:#FFF;background:#333;width:100%;" id="cmd" type="text" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
<?php } ?>

Read this

Note: The history feature works by remembering the last commands that you typed.. Access them by pressing the up or down arrows on your keyboard.

This is not an interactive session, so you cannot cd to a directory and then do stuff in that directory.. You may however be able to do stuff like /bin/bash -c "cd ../../;mv this there;ls -la;" or you could try exporting your current dir or something..

Writing shell scripts and serving them on your web server works by renaming the file.sh to file.cgi and chmodding it to 750 or +x. Also make sure you try dos2unix -dv file.cgi If you can’t get it to work..

Example shell script as cgi

#!/bin/sh
export MYBNAME=`date +%mx%dx%y-%Hx%M.tgz`
tar -czf ${HOME}/backups/${MYBNAME} ${HOME}/site1/
exit 0;

Locking Down Access to your shell.php

Thanks to the comment by Andrew Ramsden, Here are a couple ways to secure your shell.php file so that only you can run this script.

Secure your remote shell by adding this to your shell.php

Add this line to the very top of your shell.php file to make sure that only you can access this script. Everyone else sees a blank screen.

if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] !== '1.1.1.1') die();

Secure your remote shell with htaccess

This only allows access from IP 1.1.1.1 and redirects everyone else. See Using the Allow Directive in Apache htaccess for more info.

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 1.1.1.1
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.askapache.com

Secure your remote shell with mod_rewrite and htaccess

Based on the code from htaccess article This only allows access from user with IP of 1.1.1.1 and redirects everyone else.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^1\.1\.1\.1
RewriteRule .* http://www.askapache.com [R=302,L]

PHP and AJAX shell console originally appeared on AskApache.

Welcome to the first generation of the new .htaccess tutorials/articles. Basically these are articles detailing my BEST (almost) successful .htaccess experiments, meaning this is the only place on the net you’ll find this technique. It’s home-grown .htaccess, and its some kush, good kush. Instead of just publishing my cryptic results and code in days past, whoah.. a working demo and the NSA building ;)

Using the Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet makes this example, and all advanced .htaccess code easier to understand. Well, advanced for me at least. I know alot of AskApache visitors are some of the top gurus in many IT fields, but mostly web developers or website owners like me.. This demo is pretty self-explanatory.. Try it out to see how simple of a task this .htaccess trick performs. And make sure you read the whole article as this htaccess technique can be used to do a heck of a lot more than this simple demo.

Set PDF Viewing Mode

Whoa pretty sweet huh? Bet you’ve never seen that before! As I explain the htaccess code that achieves this, keep in mind this is merely one simple application for this code. It’s much more advanced than your basic htaccess trick, notice how this htaccess acts like a php script, very unusual.. I really wanted to share this trick after I created it for one of my clients because this is the tip of the iceberg. Another use would be to display an alternate style sheet depending on a users theme preference. The coolest thing about this example IMHO is that it uses multiple advanced .htaccess ideas in order for it to work, most htaccess code on the net is very singular. This code uses mod_headers to set the Content-Disposition header for forcing a download and uses mod_rewrite to:

1. Send different Content-Type headers
2. Check the value of a cookie
3. Set environment variables for use later by mod_headers header directive

What’s Going On

There are 3 different ways for a server to send a pdf file in response to a request for one. This causes 3 different ways to open/view the pdf file in the clients browser.

1. The browser display’s a “Save File As” dialog, allowing you to save the file or open.
2. The browser opens the pdf file “Inline”, opening the pdf file in the browser like a web page.
3. The browser “Downloads” the pdf file automatically as an “Attachment” and then causes an external pdf reader program like adobe reader to open the file.

Some people prefer to have the option of saving the file to view later, some prefer opening it with an external program, and some just like the pdf file to load right in the browser… The point is that by using .htaccess, we can let them choose any of the 3 methods and save their preference for all further pdf files requested from our site by that user.

How It Works

When you click on one of the 3 demo buttons above, “Inline”, “Save As”, or “Download”, a cookie named askapache_pdf is saved in your browser using the javascript below, with the value being set to which button you clicked. Then when you request the pdf file the .htaccess code below uses mod_rewrite to read the value of the askapache_pdf cookie, and depending on which was your preference it will send alternate HTTP Headers that control how your browser handles the file.

Htaccess Demo File

For the demo I created the folder /storage/pdf/ and this is the .htaccess file at /storage/pdf/.htaccess

#
# The default Content-Type for .pdf files
# This will make .pdf files default Content-Type header have
# the value 'application/pdf' - but the default can be overridden by
# using RewriteRule with the [T='different/type']
#
AddType application/pdf .pdf
 
#
# Turn on the rewrite engine
# if its already on you dont need this
#
RewriteEngine On
 
#
# Skip RewriteRules if not .pdf request, like autoindexing
# The next [2] RewriteRule directives are specific for .pdf files
# so if the filename requested does not end in .pdf
# then the [S=2] instructs the next 2 RewriteRule
# directives to be completely skipped
#
RewriteRule !.*\.pdf$ - [S=2]
 
#
# The first RewriteCond checks to see if the askapache_pdf cookie
# is NOT set.  The second RewriteCond checks to see if the askapche_pdf
# cookie has the value of s, which is the value corresponding to
# someone clicking the "Save As" button.
#
# The [NC,OR] flag means that if the cookie askapache_pdf does not
# exist, OR (next cond) if the askapache_pdf cookie does exist and is set to 's'
# then process the RewriteRule.  If neither cond is true the rewriterule is skipped.
#
# If one of the RewriteCond is true, then the RewriteRule is processed.
# The RewriteRule applies to any/all requests (.*) but doesn't rewrite anything (-)
# This RewriteRule sets an Apache environment variable ASKAPACHE_PDFS to have the
# value of 1 if either rewritecond is true.  The variable can be checked by any directives
# following the rewriterule in the whole htaccess file.  The ASKAPACHE_PDFS ends in S
# because if this variable exists then it means the users preference is 'Save As'
#
# Notice that if the user requested the pdf file without selecting a preference
# i.e. no cookie exists, then the ASKAPACHE_PDFS variable is still set.
# This just lets us pick the default preference for them, in this example the
# default is 'Save As'
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*askapache_pdf.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*askapache_pdf=s.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [E=ASKAPACHE_PDFS:1]
 
#
# The RewriteCond checks the askapache_pdf cookie for the value 'a'
# which 'a' represents 'Download'
#
# If the cookies value is 'a' then the RewriteRule overrides the default
# Content-Type from 'application/pdf' set with AddType earlier, to
# 'application/octet-stream', which is a special content-type that tells the browser
# that the file cannot be loaded by the browser 'Inline', but must be saved
# which will be opened by an external viewer depending on browser
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*askapache_pdf=a.*$
RewriteRule .* - [T=application/octet-stream]
 
#
# This is superfly.  If the cookie/users-preference was 'Save As' (s)
# then the RewriteRule above the last one set the environment
# variable ASKAPACHE_PDFS to have the value 1.  The Header directive here
# is ONLY processed in that variable ASKAPACHE_PDFS exists.  That is what
# the end 'env=ASKAPACHE_PDFS' does, it is the condition that must be met or
# the Header directive is skipped.
#
# If the ASKAPACHE_PDFS environment variable set by RewriteRule does exist
# then the header directive adds the header 'Content-Disposition: attachment' to
# the normal Response Headers.  The 'Content-Disposition: attachment' header
# instructs your browser to present you with the 'Save As' dialog box
# allowing you to choose whether you want to save or open
#
Header set Content-Disposition "attachment" env=ASKAPACHE_PDFS

Unique HTTP Headers Returned

When it comes down to it, the following information is the 3 modes. Notice each one is different, because these headers are the only thing controlling how your browser handles the file.

Save As Mode (askapache_pdf=s)

Content-Disposition: attachment
Content-Type: application/pdf

Inline Mode (askapache_pdf=i)

Content-Type: application/pdf

Download Mode (askapache_pdf=a)

Content-Type: application/octet-stream

Javascript used by Demo

The best place for javascript is quirksmode, here is a definitive article on setting, reading, parsing, etc.. COOKIES.

  if(!gi('pdfr'))return;
  var pdfr=gi('pdfr');
  var cval=getCookie('askapache_pdf');

  if(cval=='i'){pdfr.innerHTML='Currently set to "Inline".';}
  else if(cval=='a'){pdfr.innerHTML='Currently set to "Download" mode.';}
  else if(cval=='s'){pdfr.innerHTML='Currently set to "Save As" mode.';}
 
  addMyEvent(gi('pdfi'),"mousedown",function(){setCookie("askapache_pdf", "i", "", "/", "www.askapache.com"); gi('pdfr').innerHTML = 'Changed mode to "Inline".'; return false; });
  addMyEvent(gi('pdfa'),"mousedown",function(){setCookie("askapache_pdf", "a", "", "/", "www.askapache.com"); gi('pdfr').innerHTML = 'Changed mode to "Download".'; return false; });
  addMyEvent(gi('pdfs'),"mousedown",function(){setCookie("askapache_pdf", "s", "", "/", "www.askapache.com"); gi('pdfr').innerHTML = 'Changed mode to "Save As".'; return false; });

Alternative Method – No Cookies + PHP

This is what I came up with first for my client, and then while programming the php I noticed.. Hey! I think I can do the same thing using .htaccess, which would save me on cpu/memory/potential security/etc.. but this works great too. Though you will need to hack the code to get it working probably..

Note that the .htaccess rewrite code I used here used FILENAME-i.pdf or FILENAME-s.pdf to pass the preference to the pdf-dl.php script, it also worked for FILENAME.pdf?i=i

pdf-dl.php

if (
!isset($_GET['file'])
|| ($f=$_GET['file'])===false
|| ($fp=@fopen($f,"rb"))===false
|| ($fi=pathinfo($f))===false
|| ($fi['fsize']=filesize($f))===false
|| strtolower($fi["extension"])!='pdf'
) die('Failed');

ob_start();
header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
header("Content-Length: {$fi['fsize']}");
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
if(!isset($_GET['i'])) header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"{$fi['basename']}\"");

$sent = 0;
while ( !feof($fp) && $sent < $fi['fsize'] && ($buf = fread($fp, 8192)) != '' ){
echo $buf;
$sent += strlen($buf);
flush();
ob_flush();
}
fclose($fp);
exit;
?>

Alternate Method .htaccess

#
# Deny direct request to pdf-dl.php file
#
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*pdf-dl\.php.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
 
#
# Handle PDF files named anything-i.pdf as inline
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ([^/]*)-i\.pdf$  /cgi-bin/pdf-dl.php?i=i&file=%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/storage/pdf/$1.pdf [L,NC,QSA,S=1]
 
#
# Handle PDF files without -i.pdf as attachments
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ([^/]*)\.pdf$  /cgi-bin/pdf-dl.php?file=%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/storage/pdf/$1.pdf [L,NC,QSA]

More Info

The following is more information about the Content-Dispositon header and related headers, and will make you an expert at this if you read it all.. (no thanks)

Interesting Reading

Here is the thread of the original draft proposal for the Content-Disposition header.

• Content-Disposition Header, Rens Troost - 22 Jun 1993
  • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Nathaniel Borenstein
    • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Gabe Beged-Dov
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Rens Troost
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Gabe Beged-Dov
      • Content-Disposition Header and multipart/alternative, Rens Troost
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header and multipart/alternative, Nathaniel Borenstein
    • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Keith Moore
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Nathaniel Borenstein
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Ed Levinson (Contractor)
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Keith Moore
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Rens Troost
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Harald Tveit Alvestrand
    • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Steve Dorner
      • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Rens Troost
        • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Keith Moore
    • Re: Content-Disposition Header, Carlyn M. Lowery

Intense Reading

• Using the MIME Headers Effectively
• Mail Content Disposition Values and Parameters
• Tags for the Identification of Languages
• The Internet Gopher Protocol (a distributed document search and retrieval protocol)
• Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW
• Uniform Resource Locators (URL)
• Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0
• Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies
• Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers
• Standard for The Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages
• Relative Uniform Resource Locators
• Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages
• Network News Transfer Protocol
• MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
• Form-based File Upload in HTML
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• Media Type Registration Procedure
• File Transfer Protocol
• Assigned Numbers
• Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names
• The Content-MD5 Header Field
• Renumbering Needs Work
• GZIP file format specification version 4.3
• Improving HTTP Latency
• Analysis of HTTP Performance
• Network Time Protocol (Version 3) Specification, Implementation and Analysis
• DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification version 1.3
• Analysis of HTTP Performance Problems,
• ZLIB Compressed Data Format Specification version 3.3
• An Extension to HTTP: Digest Access Authentication
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
• Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels
• Communicating Presentation Information in Internet Messages: The Content-Disposition Header
• Use and Interpretation of HTTP Version Numbers
• Common Internet Message Headers
• UTF-8, a transformation format of Unicode and ISO-10646
• Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types
• IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages
• Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax and Semantics
• HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
• MIME E-mail Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)
• The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3
• Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
• Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples
• Communicating Presentation Information in Internet Messages: The Content-Disposition Header Field

Advanced Htaccess Demo/Example using Cookies, Headers, Rewrites originally appeared on AskApache.

Big Picture: Going from no website to AskApache.com in less than a year can be accomplished by anyone with unique content and a resolve to avoid any shortcuts and take it one step at a time.

We want what Google wants, to provide the most relevant content for someone who is doing a search. Basically, you want every url on your site that has unique content to be included in the index. In other words, you have to think like a search engine!

The Goal of Google

Here’s what I mean, Google approaches search with the overwhelming goal of bringing the content to a searcher that is the most-likely to be what that searcher is searching for. Another way of looking at it is something I read on Google…

Google’s goal is to get you off of their site as fast as possible by providing you with exactly what you are looking for.

Think about SEO like this

If you search for htaccess tutorial for seo on Google, would you be more likely to visit a tutorial about using .htaccess for seo or a category page for htaccess articles? AskApache.com has both of those urls included in the index, but the article ranks higher than the category page, as it very well should.

Get Your URLS Indexed

Before I explain how I am able to help Google and other search engines rank my article pages higher than my category pages, we need to get the urls in the index or nothing will show up. There are many well-discussed methods for getting included in the index, so I’ll just list a few that I use.

1. Provide High-Quality original content, people will link to it
2. Get a sitemap and use Google Webmaster Tools
3. Publish an RSS/Atom Feed and ping the net when you publish a post
4. Use robots.txt and robots meta tags

Your URLs in the index

Here’s how to find out which of your pages are indexed.

• Indexed pages in your site: site:
• Pages that link to your site’s front page: link:
• The current cache of your site: cache:
• Information about your site: info:
• Pages that are similar to your site: related:

Break It Down

Yo homeslice! I didn’t mean break dance.. I mean lets simplify AskApache in the context of getting our urls indexed high/low. Here’s the stats: 1 Homepage, 206 Articles, 19 Pages, 31 Categories

1 Homepage

This page is generally the highest ranking page in the index, it should contain links to your best urls, and provide easy navigation

206 Specific Topic Articles

These are the article’s (like this one) of AskApache.com and are the main source of search engine traffic. You want each url (if its a good article) to be ranked as high as possible. Some keys are to really make each article specific to a topic by using best-practice (X)HTML.

19 Static Pages

Most of these are pages like the online-tools hosted on this site, or other basic pages like about, contact us, site-map, etc.. Some of these you may want to rank very high ( like the /about/ page ) and some you may not want to even be included in the index.

31 Specific Topic Category Pages

These are tricky because they are generally just lists of articles from each category, which isn’t specific enough to get much seach-engine-traffic, but is very useful to site visitors. I beefed up my category pages by adding additional information about the category topic in addition to excerpts of the articles.

Higher Pagerank = Higher Up in Search Results

So Googlebot and other search engine robots have these crazy complicated algorithms (many patented) that SEO Industry types may get caught up in and try to technically analyze them. I’m sure you’ve seen/read/heard the complicated advice that will always be pushed by many… advice like:

• analyze the number of words in the description/title/1st paragraph/etc.
• Make sure your “keyword” is sprinkled throughout the text every 10-30th word..
• Other equally unexciting technical analysis

Now if you’ve had success with that then props to you, success is success, but I personally choose to completely ignore all that. The number 1 thing that the top search engines advise is to design your page for a Human Visitor, not a computer. The golden rule for me is how I would rank the page, not how some algorithm would.

Designing for a Human Visitor

This is a major factor in your site being at the top vs. nowhere. You design your HTML to be as minimal as possible (see source code for my homepage) and contain ONLY the neccessary elements. Above all, use semantically sound XHTML markup. (view source of W3C)

External CSS/Javascript

Get your javascript and CSS out of your HTML and use external files (like this site) ALWAYS! You should start with just the HTML, no css, no colors, no javascript, and THEN you add the .css and then you add the javascript.

Site Accessibility

Say your browser didn’t have a mouse, didn’t support images, css, javascript, or even colors! Your HTML should be structured such that your page is still easily readable and easy to navigate. You can use lynx, links, and many other terminal-based browsers to test for this… please see the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) for detailed info.

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality. For example, when a site is coded with semantically meaningful HTML, with textual equivalents provided for images and with links named meaningfully, this helps blind users using text-to-speech software and/or text-to-Braille hardware.

Controlling a URL’s Pagerank

A few tools and techniques are available for controlling the “juice” or “pagerank” of your urls.

1. Robots.txt
2. Robots Meta Tags
3. Links

Robots.txt

I’ve done quite a bit of research and experimentation with robots.txt files, which is a file located in the root of your website at http://www.askapache.com/robots.txt that is downloaded by all legitimate search engine spiders/bots and used as a Blacklist to prevent certain urls from being indexed. Here are a few of the articles on this site, which you may skip if you like as they don’t illustrate the big-picture that I am going to discuss now.

• Control Flow of Pagerank with robots.txt and NoFollow, NoIndex
• WordPress robots.txt
• SEO with Robots.txt
• Google AdSense using robots.txt
• WordPress robots.txt file optimized for SEO and Google

How To Use Robots.txt

Even though robots.txt files are for whitelisting and blacklisting urls, I have found that they should only be used as an extreme form of blacklisting. When you Disallow a url in your robots.txt file, that means most search engine bots won’t even LOOK at the url. As you can see in the below example, I only disallow urls that shouldn’t ever be LOOKED at. The real powertool is the robots meta tag.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
 
Sitemap: http://www.askapache.com/sitemap.xml

Robots Meta Tag

Ok I’m really trying to simplify, because what you should understand is the big-picture. Every page can have a robots meta tag in the header, and this robots meta tag can tell the search-engine to index/not-index AND follow/not-follow. Here are some examples:

<meta name="robots" content="index" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

content=”index” / noindex

index means the search engine is free to index, archive, cache, and follow the page whereas noindex means DO NOT include this page in the search engine results.

content=”follow” / nofollow

follow means the search engine is free to LOOK at the page and follow the links on the page whereas nofollow means DO NOT follow the links on the page.

WordPress Auto-Robots meta tag code

Just add this to any plugin file and it will add the right robots meta tag to your site.. tweak to taste.

function askapache_robots_header(){
 global $wpdb;
 
 $robot = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,nocache,noarchive" />';

 if ( is_paged() || is_search() || is_404() || is_author() || is_tag() )
   $robot = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
 elseif ( is_home() || is_front_page() || is_single() )
   $robot = '<meta name="robots" content="follow,index" />';
 elseif ( is_category() || is_page() )
   $robot = '<meta name="robots" content="follow" />';
 
 echo $robot . "\n";
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'askapache_robots_header' );

Links

External and Internal Links are the crux of SEO. It’s important to start FIRST on your Internal Links and linking structure… Once you are satisfied that the correct pages are indexed and ranked appropriately, then you can begin to look at external links.

• The fewer links on a page, generally the better.
• If every page of your site points to the same url on your site, pagerank goes up from the number of internal links.
• Use of the rel, title, alt attribute semantically is very helpful. (next, prev, index)
• Put your best links higher up in the XHTML, and put helpful/solid links at the end.
• You can add rel="nofollow" to links that you dont want followed.

The web has gotten to be so full of malicious/non-helpful SEO activity that I recommend developing your content NOT external links. If you want to do this right and provide great content that makes search engine users happy and makes the web better, then explore this blog and develop content until the next article in this series, where I’ll show you how to make your site explode.

Stay tuned for Part III, which will dive deeper into the pipeworks of AskApache.com

SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2 originally appeared on AskApache.

1. Host the Google-Analytics ga.js file locally
2. Set Correct Cookie Domain
3. Make Sure Google Analytics Loads

Default Google-Analytics Tracking Code

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2452345-5");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

1. Hosting the Google ga.js file locally

Instead of calling the http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js file in your site’s html, you can instead save the ga.js source code and serve it from on your own server! This reduces DNS lookups, gives you control over caching, and if you combine the ga.js with a javascript file already on your site like I do, you reduce HTTP Requests, reduce browser cache lookups, etc.

For this site, I added the ga.js code to my http://z.askapache.com/z/j/apache-999.js file, then I compressed it online and saved to serve!

How to Do it: Serve External Javascript Files locally for Increased Speed

2. Set Correct Domain for Cookie

For those websites who employ multiple sub-domains to serve static content, and you are using the default google-analytics javascript code for website statistics, you may be able to get some speed by forcing the google analytics cookie to only be sent for your non-static subdomain.

I just noticed this on my site the other day while watching the wire:

The Google Analytics cookie was being set for the domain .askapache.com and so it was being sent needlessly with every request to every subdomain, when it only should be sent for requests to www.askapache.com.

Specify Google-Analytics Cookie Domain

So I googled for an answer for awhile and finally found the solution in the ga.js code itself. There is a command called _setDomainName that lets you set the domain for the cookie. The following code sets the GA cookie for .www.askapache.com, ensuring that the cookie will not be sent needlessly for images and other static content.

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-732153-7");
pageTracker._setDomainName("www.askapache.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();

3. Make Sure Google Analytics Loads

Look at the source code for this page to see how I do it. Here is what is going on:

1. Add the google javascript at the bottom of my source code to make sure the HTML and DOM is fully loaded before first calling the script for download.
2. Check that the google-javascript is loaded by testing that the object called _gat exists, which is the internal object created.
3. Initiate google-analytics

The Safer Google-Analytics Include Code

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof(_gat) == "object") {
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-732153-7");
  pageTracker._setDomainName("www.askapache.com");
  pageTracker._initData();
  pageTracker._trackPageview();
}
</script>

Top 3 Speed Tips for Sites using Google Analytics originally appeared on AskApache.

Speed Benefit

The speed benefit occurs because normally a site visitor has to perform a DNS query for both the google-analytics.com and quantcast.com servers, create a connection to each server, and then download the files. By hosting these scripts on your own server you remove all the extra DNS queries, and by hosting all the files on your single server you enable advanced HTTP 1/1 protocol features like Pipelining the requests, which means a single connection for multiple files.

Cache and Compression Control

Serving these javascript files from your own server gives you complete control over the caching and compression settings of those files, which may not seem like a big deal… unless you know about the advanced caching and compression techniques available to make your site super-fast.

Caching Control

By using the mod_rewrite cache hack like I do, you can make sure that a fresh version of the .js file is used by your visitors.

Compression Control

You can also specify advanced compression for these files, which could mean using Apache’s mod_deflate or mod_gzip modules, or you can even use a compression tool like Dojo’s Shrinksafe, Packer, JSMin, or YUICompressor to further compress the javascript files.

Automated Downloading with Crontab

Using crontab I tell my web server to run this shell script every day, to make sure I have updated versions of all the files. Here’s the crontab entry I use to run this shell script every day.

@daily /bin/sh /home/cron-scripts/grab_javascripts.sh 2>&1 &>/dev/null

Shell Script to Download JS

I created a simple Bash shell-script to download the javascript files. All you need to do is modify the variables to save to your directory and send your site as the Referring URL and you are good to go. You can add as many files as you want by adding them to the JSFILE array.

You can also download the shell-script: grab_javascripts.sh

#!/bin/bash
# 2008-09-30
umask 022
VER="2.0"
 
### Set as the referring url for downloads
SITE=http://www.askapache.com/
 
### Directory to save the downloaded files
JSD=$HOME/j/
 
### The files to download
JSFILE[0]=http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
 
### run script with args to turn on debugging
[[ $# -ne 0 ]] && set -o xtrace && set -o verbose
 
### SHELL OPTIONS
set +o noclobber # allowed to clobber files
set +o noglob # globbing on
set -e # abort on first error
shopt -s extglob
 
#--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--=--#
# pt
#==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==-==#
function pt(){
  case ${1:-d} in
   i) echo -e "${C6}=> ${C4}${2} ${C0}"; ;;
   m) echo -en "\n\n${C2}>>> ${C4}${2} ${C0}\n\n"; ;;
   *) echo -e "\n${C8} DONE ${C0} \n"; ;;
  esac
}
 
#=# CATCH SCRIPT KILLED BY USER
trap 'kill -9 $$' SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
 
#=# MAKE MAIN SCRIPT NICE AS POSSIBLE SINCE IT DOESNT DO MUCH
renice 19 -p $$ &>/dev/null
 
#=# TURNS ON COLORING ONLY FOR TERMS THAT CAN SUPPORT IT
C="\033[";C0=;C1=;C2=;C3=;C4=;C5=;C6=;C7=;C8=;C9=;
  C0="${C}0m";C1="${C}1;30m";C2="${C}1;32m";C3="${C}0;32m";C4="${C}1;37m"
  C5="${C}0;36m";C6="${C}1;35m";C7="${C}0;37m";C8="${C}30;42m";C9="${C}1;36m";
clear
echo -e "${C1} __________________________________________________________________________ "
echo -e "| ${C2}             ___       __    ___                 __             ${C1}         |"
echo -e "| ${C2}            / _ | ___ / /__ / _ | ___  ___ _____/ /  ___        ${C1}         |"
echo -e "| ${C2}           / __ |(_-</  '_// __ |/ _ \/ _ \`/ __/ _ \/ -_)       ${C1}         |"
echo -e "| ${C3}          /_/ |_/___/_/\_\/_/ |_/ .__/\_,_/\__/_//_/\__/        ${C1}         |"
echo -e "| ${C3}                               /_/                              ${C1}         |"
echo -e "|                                                                          |"
echo -e "|                 ${C4} LOCAL JAVASCRIPT FILES SCRIPT Version ${VER} ${C1}              |"
echo -e "${C1} __________________________________________________________________________ ${C0} \n\n"
 
#=# BUILD INCOMING DIRS
[[ ! -d "${JSD}" ]] && pt m "BUILDING DIRS" && mkdir -p $JSD &>/dev/null && pt i "CREATED $JSD" && pt
 
#=# DOWNLOAD JAVASCRIPT FILES
cd $JSD && pt m "DOWNLOADING JAVASCRIPT FILES"
for theurl in "${JSFILE[@]}"; do
pt i "${theurl}"
curl -m 60 --connect-timeout 10 --retry 10 --retry-delay 180 -s -S -L -e '${SITE}' -A 'Mozilla/5.0' -O "${theurl}"
done
pt && cd $OLDPWD
 
######## curl options
# -S Show error. With -s, make curl show errors when they occur
# -s Silent mode. Don't output anything
# -e  Referer URL (H)
# -H <line> Custom header to pass to server (H)
# -L  Follow Location: hints (H)
# -A <string> User-Agent to send to server (H)
# -m <seconds> Maximum time allowed for the transfer
# --connect-timeout <seconds> Maximum time allowed for connection
# --globoff  Disable URL sequences and ranges using {} and []
# -O  Write output to a file named as the remote file
# --retry <num>  Retry request <num> times if transient problems occur
# --retry-delay <seconds> When retrying, wait this many seconds between each
# --retry-max-time <seconds> Retry only within this period
#############################################################################
 
exit 0

Serve External Javascript Files locally for Increased Speed originally appeared on AskApache.

Try it out a few times and see which compression engine works the best for you.. I’ve been compressing my javascript for years and It translates into much faster rendering and faster connections. Automate it like I do. I’ve used Dojo/Shrinksafe powered by Rhino. for awhile, but its always nice to see if something else works better.. let me know what works the best for you guys.

Arthur Blake

There are many tools available that can help you compress your JavaScript code but it can be time consuming and difficult to analyze which tool works the best for a given situation. This web application shows aggregated statistics on the general level of compression in all these tools, and allows developers to easily play with and compare the different tools on their own JavaScript code without having to set up all the tools on their own.

Javascript Input

CompressorRator Output

Javascript Compression Options

The following compression tools are compared, both with and without the affects of additional gzip compression that are supported natively by modern web browsers.

• JSMin is a conservative compressor, written several years ago by Douglas Crockford. It is considered safe (especially if you verify your code with JSLint first– an excellent thing to do anyway) because it doesn’t attempt to change any variable names.
• Dojo shrinksafe is a very popular Java based JavaScript compressor that parses the JavaScript using the rhino library and crunches local variable names.
• Packer by Dean Edwards, is also a very popular JavaScript compressor, that can go beyond regular compression and also add advanced on-the-fly decompression with a JavaScript runtime piece.
• YUI Compressor is a newer compressor written by Julien Lecomte, that aims to combine the safety of JSMin with the higher compression levels acheived by Dojo Shrinksafe. Like Dojo shrinksafe, it is written in Java and based on the rhino library.

Online Tool compares Packer, JSMin, Dojo, and YUI Compressor originally appeared on AskApache.

AskApache Google 404 is a must-have WordPress plugin that uses some ajax and a couple tricks to display a very helpful and SEO Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.

Updated: 01/26/2008
Install Time: 10 seconds to 5 minutes
Install Difficulty: Super Easy

Demo 404 Error Page

Click Image

Heads Up: I’ve been thinking about ways to improve this plugin for awhile now, and I’m going to be releasing an upgrade in the coming weeks! Any specific feature requests let me know~

Downloads

404.php Installation

1. Upload zip/tar.gz file to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory and unzip.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Go to your Options Panel and open the “AA Google 404″ submenu. /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=askapache-google-404.php
4. Enter in your Google Search API Key and hit the “Update Key” Button. (Get One)
5. Add the code to your 404.php template page by including <?php if(function_exists('aa_google_404'))aa_google_404();?> in your main content area.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a Google Account?

Yes.

Do I need a 404.php template file?

Only if you want to use this for your error page.

My 404.php page isn’t being served for 404 Not Found errors!?

Add ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404 to your .htaccess file.

What is a Google API Key?

How do I get a Google API Key?

Google 404 Screenshots

Loading Video… [dl]

Plugin Configuration Panel

Search Entire Web

Search Blogs

Search Custom Search Engines

Search Images

Search Online Videos

More Info from Google

• AJAX Search API
• AJAX Search Wizards
• Developer Guide
• Code Samples
• Community Samples
• Knowledge Base
• AJAX APIs Blog
• Developer Forum

SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin originally appeared on AskApache.