NOT a typo.. 30x is measurable, well-documented, and easily tested. This is what open-source is about. I haven’t had time to post much the past year, I'm always working! So I wanted to make up for that by publishing an article on a topic that would blow your mind and be something that you could actually start using and really get some benefit out of it. This is one of those articles that the majority of web hosting companies would love to see in paperback, so they could burn it.
Optimization tmpfs
.htaccess is a very ancient configuration file for web servers, and is one of the most powerful configuration files most webmasters will ever come across. This htaccess guide shows off the very best of the best htaccess tricks and code snippets from hackers and server administrators.
You've come to the right place if you are looking to acquire mad skills for using .htaccess files!
Apache, Hosting, Htaccess, Optimization, Security, SEO, Web Development, WordPress .htpasswd 301 Redirect Apache Apache HTTP Server Cache Hosting Htaccess Htaccess Software HTTP Headers httpd.conf HyperText Transfer Protocol mod_rewrite Redirect RewriteCond RewriteRule SSL
Some good examples for how to use the Files and FilesMatch directives in .htaccess files and httpd.conf files for Apache.
<FilesMatch ".(htm|html|css|js|php)$">
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
DefaultLanguage en-US
</FilesMatch>
Htaccess FilesMatch
Unix file permissions are one of the more difficult subjects to grasp.. Well, ok maybe "grasp" isn't the word.. Master is the right word.. Unix file permissions is a hard topic to fully master, mainly I think because there aren't many instances when a computer user encounters them seriously, and bitwise is oldschool. This contains a listing of all possible permission masks and bits from a linux, php, and web hosting view.... cuz you guys AskApache Regs Rock!
Security chmod File Permissions umask
One way I speed up AskApache.com is by downloading external third-party javascript files to host on my own server instead of externally. In addition to the obvious speed boost, this lets you configure the caching and compression settings for the files.
Javascript
While researching a unix/linux tool awk I came upon one of the most thorough and helpful tutorials I've ever seen devoted to a particular topic. It's old-school just the way I like it. I contacted the author, Bruce Barnett because I just HAD to have this article for my readers, who are predominantly running solaris/unix/bsd/linux and he kindly gave permission.
Linux
Here is even more information from the Ultimate Htaccess Part I. For now this is very rough and you will want to come back later to read it.
Htaccess Apache HTTP Server Htaccess World Wide Web
If you ever wanted to know the best way to defragment and speed up your Windows-Based PC, I mean you really wanted to know, here is the 2nd part to my article on Windows Speed Optimizing that details the process I have found works really well. Definately not a quick process, and certainly not the best ever, just my best ever and one that you only have to do once to get the benefits.
This article has a lot of incredibly useful (and FREE) tools I recommend, which you can grab and use without reading the article..
Windows Defragmentation Defragmentation software Disk Defragmenter ERUNT JkDefrag Microsoft MyDefrag PageDefrag Registry cleaner UltraDefrag Windows Registry Windows XP
PHP
Learning about charset's and file types maybe pretty boring, but using .htaccess it can be fun! Here's a quicklist htaccess cheatsheet for adding the correct Charset to a web document.
Htaccess AddCharset AddDefaultCharset AddType FilesMatch ForceType UTF-8
2 awesome ways to implement caching on your website using Apache .htaccess or httpd.conf. Both methods are extremely simple to set up and will dramatically speed up your site! Htaccess Cache Cache-Control ETag Expires Header Headers Htaccess mod_expires mod_headers
If you want to pre-load .flv / .mp3 files into a visitors browser cache using flash, here's the actionscript I use to do it, and some ideas behind a good javascript implementation using swfobject or ufo.
Optimization
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..
Optimization Actionscript Cache Caching Flash flv Htaccess preload SWF
Apache Security tips and tricks for securing Apache Web Servers using htaccess, httpd.conf, and other built-in techniques to thwart attackers. This really should be required reading for any Apache admin or user because these little tricks are so easy to do.
Htaccess
If you have files on your site that you don't want indexed by malicious search engines, grabbed and leeched by malicious spammers, or stolen and made available elsewhere, you can use mod_rewrite to drastically reduce or totally reduce that activity.
Htaccess Htaccess malicious search engines mod_rewrite Spamming
FYI, using the Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet makes this example, and all advanced .htaccess code easier to understand. This demo lets you set a cookie with 1 of 3 values, then you just request the pdf file with a normal link click and get 1 of 3 different responses. This is accomplished with a nice bit of .htaccess code.
Htaccess Htaccess HTTP cookie JavaScript PDF pdf.js Portable Document Format
Files that can be deleted after installing wordpress
- license.txt
- Readme.html
- the import*.php files
WordPress
What they say about kung-fu is true..
It can be attained by anyone through hard work over time. You can become as good as the amount of work you put in. Here's a short look at a basic technique that I use. Simply reverse engineering the source code and taking notes along the way...
static void php_session_send_cookie(TSRMLS_D)
if (SG(headers_sent)) {
if (output_start_filename) {
php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at %s:%d)",
output_start_filename, output_start_lineno);
} else {
php_error_docref(NULL TSRMLS_CC, E_WARNING, "Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent");
}
return;
}
/* URL encode session_name and id because they might be user supplied */
e_session_name = php_url_encode(PS(session_name), strlen(PS(session_name)), NULL); PHP PHP Session Session ID
#### No https except to wp-admin -
# If the request is empty ( implies fopen or normal file access by a php script )
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^$ [OR]
# OR if the request if for wp-admin or wp-login.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(wp-admin|wp-login.php).*$ [NC,OR]
# OR if the Referer is https
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https://www.askapache.com/.*$ [NC]
# THEN skip the following rule, basically all this does is force https or badhost to be redirected
# BUT because of the above 3 rewritecond's, this won't break poorly written admin scripts
RewriteRule .* - [S=1]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.askapache.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://www.askapache.com%{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] Htaccess RewriteCond RewriteEngine RewriteRule
Web Developers sometimes use file.ext?v=004 as a version control system to force visitors to use updated files. This is terrible. Instead link to apache-003.css and set it to be cached forever. When you change the file you just change the links to apache-004.css. That eliminates millions of bandwidth and resource robbing If-Modified-Since requests. You only need Apache with mod_rewrite, and 1-10 minutes!
Htaccess Apache HTTP Server Cache Caching Htaccess httpd.conf
.htaccess and php example serves .pdf files to give visitors the choice to open in an external program or save to disk without having to open it in the browser
PDF Before and after Fix - Firefox
Htaccess
Windows boot.ini
Wouldn't it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!
PHP
One of the biggest speed bottlenecks of sites today are images, specifically unoptimized images or large scaled images. With Apaches Rewrite module we can convert all existing jpegs and png files (and most gifs) to webp, then transparently rewrite them so that a request for img.png from a browser that supports webp will receive img.webp.
Hosting, Htaccess, Optimization accept Header png RewriteCond RewriteRule vary webp
There are so many WordPress plugins out there now that I wanted to post my favorite 3 plugins for speeding up a WP-Powered blog. These are the 3 plugins that I install for pretty much all of my WP-Powered sites, which I run about 300 now. They work together to provide a very optimized blog for speed.
DB-Cache Reloaded does something entirely different, it saves the mysql queries that are made to the WP-database, as well as the mysql results to static files, and then through php serves those cached-files instead of re-querying the mysql database. Most mysql databases are stored on separate servers, and although many are on the same local network there is a limit to how many queries, and how many connections can take place.
So DB-Cache Reloaded basically makes WP-Super Cache work alot faster when generating the cache files, and DB-Cache Reloaded helps in a number of areas un-related to WP-Super Cache, like in the admin panel. And DB-Cache without WP-Super-Cache is a joke because it still uses the application-level and php for everything. Gotta use both (or just WPSC).
WordPress Cache Web server wordpress
So here's the basic idea: There are 2 sites, a development site and a live site. They are essentially mirrors of each other in terms of they have the same files. You need to disallow all search engine robots from indexing and crawling the development site, while allowing full crawling of your live site. Htaccess to the rescue!
Htaccess Htaccess RewriteRule robots.txt
Secure phpinfo.php with .htaccess, Now instead of getting a 404 error you will see debug information which will help you find out what the problem is. PHP
Htaccess AddDescription Apache bash
If for some reason you need to use windows .bat batch file scripting to do some task, or you just want to learn the most universal batch programming language on Windows machines, you lucked out and found the AskApache example. My expertise is the shell, in this article the shell is Windows cmd.exe. It has some pretty advanced windows shell usage, including pipes and redirection, but it's the modular linux-like coding approach that earns this script it's "advanced" title.
:SETPROMPT
set PROMPT=$_[%USERNAME%@%USERDOMAIN%]$S[$P]$_$M$G && EXIT /B
My favorite tool (and I've tried sooo many) for editing most Windows files and especially .bat files is the free and open-source Notepad++. Set that up and you will have a color-syntax-highlighted editor for Batch Scripting that works very very well.
Windows Batch File Batch Scripting Command Prompt Microsoft Windows
The following is just a quick but detailed reference of some of the commands I used to successfully uninstall cpanel permanently. This is for advanced users of the shell. If you run a single one of these commands without fully understanding it, you will probably kill your server, lose everything on it permanently, not have a website or email for weeks.. So backup everything. FIRST. You should also contact your hosting provider support - but be prepared for some MAJOR negativity.. cpanel makes things very easy for web-hosting companies, and you are less than a drop in their bucket.
Hacking bash cpanel linux whm
- When php run as Apache Module (mod_php)
- When php run as CGI
- When cgi?d php is run with wrapper (for FastCGI)
PHP CGI Htaccess PHP php.ini
Apache .htaccess Directives and Loaded Modules allowed on DreamHost Apache Server 2 Setups.
Hosting
Using FastCGI on DreamHost and .htaccess
Shell Scripting
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.
Hosting DreamHost
Quick and easy method to get a list of all Apache Modules currently loaded, a list of all the directives each module provides, a list of currently used directives, etc... These directives can be used in httpd.conf and/or .htaccess files so it is definately useful to know which ones are available and which ones are currently being used.
Htaccess Apache bash lynx mod_rewrite mod_status server-info server-status
A first-time visitor to your page will make several HTTP requests to download all your sites files, but using the Expires header you make those files cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.
Htaccess Expires FilesMatch Header Htaccess
The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.
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..
WordPress wordpress wp-config.php
Very nice tutorial dealing with the robots.txt file. Shows examples for google and other search engines. Wordpress robots.txt and phpBB robots.txt sample files. SEO
Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I'm piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.
Hosting Apache HTTP Server Caching Htaccess HTTP linux operating systems round-robin DNS technology Web Developer Web server
