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Htaccess Rewrites for Moving Urls

Post by AskApache Oct 29, 20111 comment

Category: Htaccess
Tags: 301 Redirects, Htaccess

30x Faster Cache and Site Speed with TMPFS

Post by AskApache Mar 18, 20107 comments

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.

Category: Optimization
Tags: tmpfs

Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks

Post by AskApache Mar 03, 20106 comments

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..

Category: WordPress

Crazy Advanced Mod_Rewrite Debug Tutorial

Post by AskApache Sep 11, 200935 comments

Note: Extremely ILL Content
Find the key to unlocking mod_rewrite and you WILL be sick.. sick with a diamond disease on your wrist!

Category: Htaccess

THE Ultimate Htaccess

Post by AskApache Jan 10, 200988 comments

Skip this - still under edit

I discovered these tips and tricks mostly while working as a network security penetration specialist hired to find security holes in web hosting environments. Shared hosting is the most common and cheapest form of web-hosting where multiple customers are placed on a single machine and "share" the resources (CPU/RAM/SPACE). The machines are configured to basically ONLY do HTTP and FTP. No shells or any interactive logins, no ssh, just FTP access. That is when I started examining htaccess files in great detail and learned about the incredible untapped power of htaccess. For 99% of the worlds best Apache admins, they don't use .htaccess much, if AT ALL. It's much easier, safer, and faster to configure Apache using the httpd.conf file instead. However, this file is almost never readable on shared-hosts, and I've never seen it writable. So the only avenue left for those on shared-hosting was and is the .htaccess file, and holy freaking fiber-optics.. it's almost as powerful as httpd.conf itself!

Most all .htaccess code works in the httpd.conf file, but not all httpd.conf code works in .htaccess files, around 50%. So all the best Apache admins and programmers never used .htaccess files. There was no incentive for those with access to httpd.conf to use htaccess, and the gap grew. It's common to see "computer gurus" on forums and mailing lists rail against all uses and users of .htaccess files, smugly announcing the well known problems with .htaccess files compared with httpd.conf - I wonder if these "gurus" know the history of the htaccess file, like it's use in the earliest versions of the HTTP Server- NCSA's HTTPd, which BTW, became known as Apache HTTP. So you could easily say that htaccess files predates Apache itself.

Once I discovered what .htaccess files could do towards helping me enumerate and exploit security vulnerabilities even on big shared-hosts I focused all my research into .htaccess files, meaning I was reading the venerable Apache HTTP Source code 24/7! I compiled every released version of the Apache Web Server, ever, even NCSA's, and focused on enumerating the most powerful htaccess directives. Good times! Because my focus was on protocol/file/network vulnerabilites instead of web dev I built up a nice toolbox of htaccess tricks to do unusual things. When I switched over to webdev in 2005 I started using htaccess for websites, not research. I documented most of my favorites and rewrote the htaccess guide for webdevelopers. After some great encouragement on various forums and nets I decided to start a blog to share my work with everyone, AskApache.com was registered, I published my guide, and it was quickly plagiarized and scraped all over the net. Information is freedom, and freedom is information, so this blog has the least restrictive copyright for you. Feel free to modify, copy, republish, sell, or use anything on this site ;)

Category: Htaccess

SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2

Post by AskApache Oct 17, 200811 comments

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.

Category: SEO

SEO Secrets of AskApache.com

Post by AskApache May 28, 20087 comments

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.

Category: SEO

Robots.txt Secrets From Matt Cutts

Post by AskApache Dec 14, 20078 comments

The secrets in this post were really more of enlightening bits of seo wisdom. The secret is how to combine robots.txt with meta robots tags to control pagerank, juice, whatever.

Category: SEO

Top methods for Faster, Speedier web sites

Post by AskApache Jun 01, 20071 comment

High Performance Web Site list of the best and newest methods to make web pages super fast using caching, compression, cache-control, etc.

Category: Optimization