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.
htaccess vs. httpd.conf
I've had a lot of people ask about the FeedBurner FeedCount image on AskApache. Specifically how to set it up with custom messages and different colors each page view... It is pretty sweet..
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.
Scrolls the latest log entries for multiple log files to the current screen or to any other monitor or TTY in color using syntax highlighting, making debugging easier and saving a lot of time for multi-monitor workstations.
I am now about 1 week away from publishing the much-anticipated 4.7 update to the AskApache Password Protection WordPress plugin. It's an upgrade I've been working on for almost 2 years (off and on)! I have been using the new version for quite some time now, and have made a lot of improvements to it, and finally I decided enough users have suffered with the old version. I am very excited for this release, it fixes all known bugs in the older versions, and brings some heavy-duty improvements to all facets of this plugin.. not to mention way better security modules (Lots more COOKIE use) based on code I use with clients.
After I optimized the caching for my non-dynamic pages using apache modules mod_headers and mod_expires, I began to learn about phpbb seo..
While reading up on gethostbyaddr on PHP.net, I saw a nice idea for using fsockopen to connect over UDP port 53 to any Public DNS server, like Google DNS 8.8.8.8, and sending the reverse addr lookup in oh about 100 bytes, then getting the response in oh about 150 bytes! All in less than a second. This is how/why to read/write data directly to the wire! This would be extremely valuable for use in things like my online header tool because it's faster than any other method. As usual, I went a bit overboard optimizing it to be lean and fast.
Using Cache-Control headers you can specify which types of proxies can cache certain content, and how long files should be cached.
The collusion add-on for Firefox is super-legit. Just navigate to any website normally, then just click the little collusion icon in the status bar and a full detailed report pops up in a new tab describing all the sites that the current site shared your data with (shared as in connected).
View the full introduction to Collusion on mozilla.org, or view my Firefox Add-on Collection: AskApache Web Development (Advanced)
Host Google Analytics ga.js file locally for increased speed! Makes web pages load faster.
What if you'd like to send a 200 OK response instead of the default 404 Not Found response using Apache .htaccess files or httpd.conf? One use would be to make sure upstream caches cache any request on an api server, as 404's are not cached.
Using a CSS Background Image Sprite with the CSS background-position and background-image I can display all these icons: . I can even have them show up anywhere on the page!
An image and technicacl achievement so profound, it will touch yoour heart.. So 3D... it'll hurt you eyes! LOL.. lol.. Man I am cracking up here. haha Ha definately the best intro ever, those really do look 3D for terminal though huh.. Sweet. Here is the little function I wrote to output that grey marble.
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..
.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
This is part II of the Advanced SEO used on AskApache.com Series and describes how to control which urls are indexed by Search Engines and how to move them higher up in Search Results.
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..
Wouldn't it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!
Use the Apache module mod_deflate to compress your static .css and .js files, speeding your site up like crazy!
To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!
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?
Well, not this sites server, which has never been hacked, but a server hosted with hostgator.
Interestingly, the hacker sent me an email and left me an mp3, which I've uploaded for your listening leisure.
Do real hackers exist? Yes. Can we coexist? Preferably!
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!
This is the advanced example. It uses the jw flv player to create a flash proxy. This basically lets me control the youtube video as if it were a local .f4v file. With this method I can specify any options, autostart, volume, playlists, etc.. But it's rather complex so lets start with 3 other methods to embed YouTube video.
Sometimes there is an urgent need for creating an exact duplicate or "mirror" of a web site on a separate server. This could be needed for creating Round Robin Setups, Load-Balancing, Failovers, or for just plain vanilla backups. In the past I have used a lot of different methods to copy data from one server to another, including creating an archive of the whole directory and then using scp to send the file over, creating an archive and then encrypting it and then sending that file over using ftp, curl, etc., and my persistence at learning new ways to do things has paid off because now I use rsync to keep an exact replica of the entire directory on an external server, without having to use all the CPU and resources of other mirroring methods.
I hope this will pursuade you to stop using PHP short_open_tag syntax.<?= or <?
A pure bash alternative to the python reflector, using curl, xargs, and sort for ranking Arch Linux mirrors.
Nice and simple. Short and sweet.
Recently I had to setup a script to curl 10k urls, but it could only do 500 requests at any one time. In order to work under that limit, I created a function that returns the number of currently running processes on the machine in an extremely fast and efficient way, thus allowing the curl_multi requests to queu themselves such as GNU xargs.
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Acronym and Abbr examples from the W3C Quality Assurance Site.
If you remove the Last-Modified and ETag header, you will totally eliminate If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match requests and their 304 Not Modified Responses.
It shows a semi-transparent box on the document you are viewing that tells you if its a page, single, feed, category, etc..
Unless you are a total linux-freak-guru like myself, and even if you are, it can be enormously challenging and somewhat overwhelming to locate and eliminate MySQL bottlenecks. While many DBAs focus on improving the performance of the queries themselves, this post will focus on the highest-impact items: MySQL Server Performance and OS Performance for MySQL. Specifically showing 4 awesome tools to auto-tune your MySQL and a few more tools just for monitoring!
strace+ is an improved version of strace that collects stack traces associated with each system call. Since system calls require an expensive user-kernel context switch, they are often sources of performance bottlenecks. strace+ allows programmers to do more detailed system call profiling and determine, say, which call sites led to costly syscalls and thus have potential for optimization.
