Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management
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.
Website SEO Score Tool
Check out this free online SEO site-scoring tool. The SEO generated report is simple, neat, and helpful. The main thing I like about it is how it is a stand-alone website, a residual money making machine.
SEO with Robots.txt
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.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!
30x Faster Cache and Site Speed with TMPFS
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.
Speed Up Sites with htaccess Caching
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!Get the Most from Search Engines
One of the most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your Web site is to optimize it for search engines. Many of them use automated programs called "crawlers" or "spiders" to create an index of the Web, which they use to determine what sites are most relevant to users' queries. These programs essentially visit Web sites, read the pages' content, and follow any links to other pages, repeating the process
DreamHost Site of The Month Contest
Every month a contest called DHSOTM is held for the highest rated website on DreamHost. By winning the contest your site gets SEO and traffic benefits, which I hope to measure soon.
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
Caching Tutorial for Webmasters
If you examine the preferences dialog of any modern Web browser (like Internet Explorer, Safari or Mozilla), you'll probably notice a 'cache' setting. This lets you set aside a section of your computer's hard disk to store representations that you've seen, just for you. The browser cache works according to fairly simple rules. It will check to make sure that the representations are fresh, usually once a session (that is, the once in the current invocation of the browser).
Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site with Htaccess
I have written more than a few articles detailing how to improve the speed of a website, and due to popular demand, this post will detail all the latest and greatest caching tricks and techniques that I utilize and love. The AskApache Best-Practices.
Top methods for Faster, Speedier web sites
High Performance Web Site list of the best and newest methods to make web pages super fast using caching, compression, cache-control, etc.DreamHost Site of The Month is AskApache!
AskApache.com won the contest for May! Thanks to all of you who voted for my site! Even though AskApache won the contest according to the rules, somehow they said I cheated by giving DreamHost too much free publicity and advertising. I love DreamHost!
Rigging the DreamHost Site of the Month Contest
Since I was disqualified and accused of cheating, which is absolutely false, I decided to go ahead and do the crime I have been punished for. That's right, I'm going to show YOU how I could have rigged the DHSOTM contest to hopefully make the statement that I absolutely did not cheat and I absolutely want to be re-instated as the winner.SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2
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.
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!
Top 3 Speed Tips for Sites using Google Analytics
Top 3 ways to speed up websites that use Google Analytics. Host Script Locally, Fix Google-Analytics Cookie Domain, and Failsafe Loading for optimum tracking statistics.
Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks
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..
Adding a PayPal Donate Now to Site
Adding a PayPal "Donate Now" button to your site is really easy. All you need is a paypal account, once logged in you can use the helpful wizard that walks you through the very quick and easy process.
Wget Trick to Download from Restrictive Sites
Before
After trick
I am often logged in to my servers via SSH, and I need to download a file like a WordPress plugin. I've noticed many sites now employ a means of blocking robots like wget from accessing their files. Most of the time they use .htaccess to do this. So a permanent workaround has wget mimick a normal browser.
Renaming Sponsored Links in AdSense
Google AdSense calles their AdSense Ads, "Sponsored Links", while Text-Link-Ads.com recommends "Sponsored By". Of course it is against the Google Adsense TOS to rename your ads, but in general, for non-adsense, what do you like to call your sponsored links?
THE Ultimate Htaccess
.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!
Come On and Sprite for your Website
Let me show you an example that works so well I am using it right now on my site. Every page in fact. If you are a young or up and coming web developer with skills to pay the bills, lets make the future Net fast, learn about optimization and refactoring while you still have the chance.
Speed up your site with Caching and cache-control
Caching with .htaccess and Apache will take your website and your web skills to the next level. This is some technical and advanced methods condensed to simple htaccess code examples for you.
Advanced .htaccess Tricks for Securing Sites
This is all new, experimental, and very very cool. It literally uses .htaccess techniques to create several virtual "locked gates" that require a specific key to unlock, in a specific order that cannot be bypassed. It uses whitelisting .htaccess tricks to specify exactly what is allowed, instead of trying to specify everything that isn't allowed. Also, by setting specific cookies/tokens after successfully passing through a gate, we can then require the exact cookie/token from the previous gate, which stops an attacker from skipping or bypassing gates.
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.
The Website Obesity Crisis
Mirroring an Entire Site using Rsync over SSH
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.
Adding YouTube Videos To Website, 4 Methods
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.
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.
Speed Up Sites with php Caching
This explains the basic methods to get started caching with php headers
Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers
Advanced Web Development by AskApache is a Firefox Collection I created since I'm always trying new Addons out and using multiple computers and I wanted a quick and easy way to install my favorite's and keep a running list. 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 listening to Kings of Leon Radio...
Shell Scripts for Dreamhost
Example shell scripts (bash or sh) that automate and easyate tasks from within the dreamhost ssh env
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.
Custom PHP.ini with FastCGI on DreamHost
I'm really sorry but I had to disable the sites you had running under user $USER because that was the only way I could keep the associated processes from restarting themselves and making the server unstable. Please do not run these sites with a persistent php.cgi process with a php.ini file as an argument.Ultimate Htaccess Part II
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.
Robots.txt Secrets From Matt Cutts
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.
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..