AskApache - Crazy Advanced Web Development

Fsockopen Power Plays

PHP’s fsockopen function lets you open an Internet or Unix domain socket connection for connecting to a resource, and is one of the most powerful functions available in the php language.

Jul 02, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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SEO Boost from Google 404 Plugin

1 minute Install!
Turns every 404 Not Found error into a SEO traffic generating event! Now you have many unique users with unique IP addresses and cookies searching your blog on all of the Google Indexes… Sweet!

«Take My 404 for a Test-Drive

Jul 01, 2008 - 112 Comments »

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Adding Print Capability to your Site with CSS

Its really nice to be able to print out a webpage you are reading using your browsers built-in print feature. Using CSS you can easily transform your site into a print-friendly site.

Today I received an email from a visitor to my site requesting that I add a way to print site articles on AskApache

Jul 01, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Securing php.ini and php.cgi with .htaccess

If you have a php.cgi or php.ini file in your /cgi-bin/ directory or other pub directory, try requesting them from your web browser. If your php.ini shows up or worse you are able to execute your php cgi, you’ll need to secure it ASAP. This shows several ways to secure these files, and other interpreters like perl, fastCGI, bash, csh, etc.

Jun 24, 2008 - 2 Comments »

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Automated Folder Backup Shell-Script

This simple unix shell script automatically creates backups of a specific folder at regular hourly, nightly, weekly, and monthly intervals. Instead of the usual method for copying directory trees using tar with fifo, pipes, rsync, or NFS methods this script uses cpio which is much much faster and has cool options like saving m/a/c times, symlinks, relative paths, and weird file names.

Jun 12, 2008 - Comment »

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AskApache.com May 2008 DreamHost Site of The Month

With a rating of 8.58, this marks the highest rated DreamHost Site Of The Month Winner in the History of the Contest!

Jun 03, 2008 - 4 Comments »

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Fast and Easy Custom WordPress New User Registration

Registering on a WP blog requires entering a username and email then checking your email for an auto password.

Too much work to put your users through?

This uses just email and password and does it all.

May 31, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Upgrading to DreamHost Private Servers

DreamHost PS gives you your own “virtual machine”, protecting your CPU and RAM on your physical machine for faster websites. Here’s what I like and dislike about DreamHostPS, and some of the issues and solutions for migrating.

May 31, 2008 - 14 Comments »

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Adding Akismet Anti-Spam Protection Anywhere

Wouldn’t you love to have Akismet Anti-spam protection for non-wordpress forms and pages?

May 07, 2008 - 5 Comments »

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Smart HTTP and HTTPS .htaccess Rewrite

This is freaking sweet if you use SSL I promise you! Basically instead of having to check for HTTPS using a RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on for every redirect that can be either HTTP or HTTPS, I set an environment variable once with the value “http” or “https” if HTTP or HTTPS is being used for that request, and use that env variable in the RewriteRule.

Apr 29, 2008 - 12 Comments »

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SEO Secrets of AskApache.com

Learn how in a year, with no previous blogging experience this blog was able to rank so high in search engines and achieve 15,000 unique visitors every day. Uses combination of tricks and tips from throughout AskApache.com for Search Engine Optimization.

Apr 28, 2008 - 5 Comments »

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Mod_Security .htaccess tricks

Mod_Security rivals Mod_Rewrite in the amount of features it provides. I decided to go ahead and post what I learned about it today, even though its tough to give away such awesome htaccess and apache tricks.. Learn how to control spam once and for all, conditionally log/deny/allow/redirect requests based on IP, username, etc.. Mod_Security is so fine!

Apr 23, 2008 - 8 Comments »

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Search And Replace shell script helpful for Upgrades

Search all files in a directory, replacing all occurances of string with a replacement string.

Apr 19, 2008 - 7 Comments »

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Undetectable Sniffing On Ethernet

I have been in some tight spots where I had to sniff a password or two off the wire, or sniff some packets off the wire and based on the packets content perform some action… Accidentally, I stumbled on a method to sniff data while remaining undetected and invisible.

Apr 14, 2008 - Comment »

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.Htaccess rewrites, Mod_Rewrite Tricks and Tips

htaccess rewrite / Mod_Rewrite Tips and Tricks is as glamorous as it sounds! htaccess rewrite mod_rewrite is just possibly one of the most useful Apache modules and features. The ability to rewrite requests internally as well as externally is extremely powerful.

Apr 10, 2008 - 49 Comments »

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Blocking Bad Bots and Scrapers with .htaccess

Want to block a bad robot or web scraper using .htaccess files? Here are 2 methods that illustrate blocking 436 various user-agents.

Apr 08, 2008 - 15 Comments »

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Crazy Cache WordPress Plugin Released

A WordPress plugin that caches your entire blog for WP-Cache, I love this plugin and finally released it to the public!

Apr 01, 2008 - 17 Comments »

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Hacking VLAN switched networks

There isn’t much vlan info on the net in terms of specifics and I had to learn all about it because I needed to log in to a switch that was on a different vlan. With the help of the Ettercap developers NaGA and ALoR I figured it out.

Mar 31, 2008 - 1 Comment »

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Apache SSL in htaccess examples

SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLRequireSSL
SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "google.com"
ErrorDocument 403 https://google.com

Some of the Ins and Outs of using SSL Connections with Apache.

Mar 29, 2008 - 9 Comments »

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Fresh .htaccess Examples: Cookies, Variables, Custom Headers

Fresh .htaccess code for you! Check out the Cookie Manipulation and environment variable usage with mod_rewrite! I also included a couple Mod_Security .htaccess examples. Enjoy!

Mar 29, 2008 - 7 Comments »

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AskApache Password Protection, For WordPress

AskApache Password Protect adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well. Imagine a HUGE brick wall protecting your frail .php scripts from the endless attacks of automated web robots and password-guessing exploit-serving scripts.

Mar 29, 2008 - 86 Comments »

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PHP Sessions/Cookies On The Fly

This article shows how to save and modify php session data, cookies, do anything really… without using ajax or iframes or forcing the user make a request.

Mar 28, 2008 - 1 Comment »

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Auto-Login to Google Analytics to impress Clients

Google Analytics for your clients sites is a no-brainer, it ROCKS! I have 100+ client sites running Analytics and all of them have trouble-free (no password or username to remember) access to their site reports. Thanks to the method in this post, my clients couldn’t be happier..

Mar 26, 2008 - 17 Comments »

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Advanced HTTP Redirection

Learn about the 7 different HTTP response codes specifically reserved for redirection. 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, and 307.

Mar 26, 2008 - 2 Comments »

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IP Abuse Detection for DreamHost

Scan Apache logs for IP address that are probably evil, then generates an .htaccess file to DENY them all.

Mar 16, 2008 - 4 Comments »

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Updated robots.txt for WordPress

Implementing an effective SEO robots.txt file for WordPress will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and increase your blog traffic. Get a search robots point of view… Sweet!

Mar 15, 2008 - 40 Comments »

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Hack WP-Cache for Maximum Speed

If you desire SPEED from your WordPress blog, the #1 speed improvement comes from using the WP-Cache Plugin. If you still desire SPEED after installing the Plugin, you can modify the WP-Cache Plugin code to make your blog even faster!

Mar 11, 2008 - 2 Comments »

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Speed Tips: Add Cache-Control Headers

Using Cache-Control headers you can specify which types of proxies can cache certain content, and how long files should be cached.

Mar 10, 2008 - 4 Comments »

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Faster Form Submission and Processing with fsockopen

Part II: Example illustrating how to speed up GET/POST form submissions. Uses fsockopen to initiate a server-side background request to process the submitted data, so that the result page of the form is displayed to the client lightningly quick.

Mar 04, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Removing Category Base from WordPress URLs

How To remove the /category/ from WordPress category urls.

James
We’re using WP as a CMS with pages and posts. Done a bit of customization, so it looks sweet. Problem – i have some child categories that throw 404 when the category redirect is in place. How did you remove the category base from the url structure in wordpress?

Mar 01, 2008 - 5 Comments »

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Instruct Search Engines to come back to site after you finish working on it

Nifty SEO tip to get Search Engine Bots to check your site every hour until you finish working on it and tell them you are finished.

Feb 28, 2008 - 10 Comments »

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Faster POST and GET Form Submissions

Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.

Feb 12, 2008 - 1 Comment »

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.htaccess mod_rewrite rewrite examples

A hit-list of some of my favorite mod_rewrite code snippets for .htaccess files

Feb 09, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Update: AskApache Password Protect Plugin

WordPress plugin gives you control over HTTP Basic Authentication for your WordPress blog which among other things, stops most automated hacking attempts and exploits being attempted, cutting down on the number of requests, connections, and mysql queries for all WordPress blogs on the Internet.

Feb 07, 2008 - 14 Comments »

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Preload flash .flv files into browser cache

How I was able to preload many flash flv and swf files on one of my clients sites that has a lot of online video and relatively small traffic. Their site visitors would usually watch 3-10 videos per visit and so to make the videos load almost instantly on every page I came up with a way to preload the top 10 .flv files and the swf flv player files as soon as the visitor successfully started watching the 1st video. Of course I also setup .htaccess caching on the server so that once they downloaded the files into their cache they would never request them from the server again. I was having fun with this so its pretty funky and uses some really cool combinations of javascript, swf preloader from xml, css classes to help automate it all..

Feb 04, 2008 - 4 Comments »

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Hacking WP Super Cache for Speed

A plugin built to generate static files from php+mysql for Apache to serve the way its supposed to be.. My dream. Conclusion: Needs some improvement, pretty sweet though.

Jan 30, 2008 - 9 Comments »

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Speed Up Google Analytics, use local ga.js

Host Google Analytics ga.js file locally for increased speed! Makes web pages load faster.

Jan 30, 2008 - 8 Comments »

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Search Engine Verify Plugin Updated

This plugin has been updated for WordPress 2.5 and includes more options to get your site indexed by Google and Yahoo.

Jan 30, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Log all .htaccess/.htpasswd logins

Learn how to log and debug usernames and passwords used to login to a htaccess basic authorization protected website using php. This article is BOSS and will show you how to fully take control of this aspect of security using php and .htaccess, I don’t believe you will find instructions to do this anywhere else on the net.

Jan 29, 2008 - 3 Comments »

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Advanced WordPress 404.php

For the AskApache Google 404 WordPress Plugin update I added a new 404.php that is more advanced than anything previously seen for a 404.php

Jan 29, 2008 - Comment »

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