Basic WordPress Theme Guide
This is a brief explanation of what is needed for an awesome theme, well awesome from my perspective. This is good stuff, memorize it.
COMPUTER SECURITY TOOLBOX
List of mainly obscure security software geared more for the master pentester. These are mostly for unix, bsd, and mac and many are difficult to install and setup (require custom servers, inside access points, obscure libraries). Only programs that output data are included, so no actual exploits or anything. Most of these output extremely useful albeit extremely technical information.Downloading Multiple Files with Curl Simultaneously
Wouldn't it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!
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
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.
Google Web Fonts for Programming and Code
Ok, so on a site like this one, there is a tremendous amount of 'code' styled with CSS fonts in a pre, code, var, tt, samp, or kbd html tag. When using an programming tool like VIM to write code it is shown beautifully using your OS fonts. So then, how can we get that same font beauty to be there on the web? And, of course the solution must use best-practices (and preferably only use CSS and (X)HTML).
Also, text effects! --> View Solution
PullQuotes using CSS
I looked at a lot of different ways to display quotes and pullquotes and even though the javascript solutions are very nice, esp. the 456bereastreet.com solution, I decided to just use CSS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
Separate favicons for the Frontend and Backend
Here's a nifty little idea I had that has some merit and is super easy. Separate favicons for separate areas of a site. Basically, I can't live without Firefox or Chrome and the way they use multiple tabs, having about 20-50 open at any one time.. But that makes it more difficult to find the right tab! 
12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS
full article: alistapart.com
- Everything you know is wrong sort of
- It's not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you're willing to face some grief and possibly not even then
- You will be forced to choose between the ideal and the practicable
- (with thanks to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry): Perfection is not when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing to take away
- Some sites are steaming heaps of edge cases
- Longer lead times
Finding Global Memory Hogs in WordPress
Mod_Rewrite Basic Examples
mod_rewrite is very useful in many situations. Yet some behaviors were not so obvious when I started to mess with it. After many testings, I understand it much better, now. Having said that, I do not pretend to know it perfectly. I also make mistakes.
Htaccess Rewrites for Moving Urls
Htaccess Mod_Rewrite – Guidedddd
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..
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
100 Alternative Search Engines
Check out ReadWriteWeb's fantastic list of uniquely useful search engines, its a lot of fun!
Faster POST and GET Form Submissions… Shazam
Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.
Playing the Market
AskApache caters to the web/system elite, who's skillsets are also good for online stock trading. Heres a look at a penny stock investment.
Apache Directives and Modules on DreamHost
Apache .htaccess Directives and Loaded Modules allowed on DreamHost Apache Server 2 Setups.
Best CSS .Classes for CSS Toolbox
CSS is one of the most useful tools I have in my toolbox as a Web Developer. Having a CSS Toolbox containing good CSS Classes that you repeatedly use is quite helpful for us XHTML / web-standards / best-practices developers. Check out 10 of my favorite CSS classes.
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.
WordPress Plugin for Apache .htaccess Security
- gzip's previous .htaccess file and sends it as an attachment to the logged in users email account along with password user setup.
- Now also works for sites running on SSL (PHP version >4.3.0)
- Rewrote the security module code in the form of snort, nessus, and mod_security rules and signatures
- Added a *real* check to see if mod_rewrite is installed
- Added Modules that remove directoryindexes
- Much more on the way..
Lets win the DreamHost Contest
DreamHost has a contest every month nicknamed "DHSOTM" or DreamHost Site Of The Month, that lets the customers rank websites hosted on DreamHost.
By winning the contest you get to put a graphic designed in the 90's on your site. I want it so bad!
Speed Tips: Use Multiple SubDomains
To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!
Debugging Tools for Windows
I am almost ready to publish the final tutorial on using ssh tunnels from a truecrypt partition on a Windows machine. Of course I choose to go way overboard in my research and the tutorial is full of some pretty awesome windows tricks.. I will come back to this post soon and post all the other advanced tools I use for debugging windows, for now though you MUST know how to debug the kernel and use these basic debugging tools.
Speed Tips: Remove Last-Modified Header
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.
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.
Chmod, Umask, Stat, Fileperms, and File Permissions
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!
DNS Round Robin Configuration using Rsync over SSH
The goal is to add the HostGator server to be an exact mirror of the s.askapache.net domain, then to add that server as a 2nd A record to my DNS zone. That way half the visitors to the size will be taking up resources and bandwidth on the HostGator server instead of mine.
Round Robin A records in DNS are intended to evenly distribute queries between each host of the same name. Using some tricks straight out of a hackers toolbox we can verify if the distribution is taking place. (It is.)
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.
An AskApache Plugin Upgrade to Rule them All
So my blog as been rather quiet for almost a year now, and very few updates if any have been released for my Password Protection PLugin, my Google 404 Plugin, and definately not for my AskApache CrazyCache plugin, which I will be releasing last... So for all of you who've helped me out by sending me suggestions and notifying me of errors and sticking with it... Just wanted to say sorry about that, and thanks for all the great ideas.. Well, I've been sticking with it as well believe it our not. I manage to get free days once in a while, and then its time to jam.
Optimizing Servers and Processes for Speed with ionice, nice, ulimit
To prepare for several upcoming articles on AskApache that are focused on optimizing Servers and Sites from a server admin level, here is an article to introduce the main tools that we will be using. These tools are used to optimize CPU time for each process using nice and renice, and other tools like ionice are used to optimize the Disk IO, or Disk speed / Disk traffic for each process. Then you can make sure your mysqld and httpd processes are always fast and prioritized.
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..
Referer Spoofing Using JavaScript
Even though at the moment I'm more into AJAX and simple behavioural unobtrusive javascript more than java, I still remember how excited I was back in 1995 when Sun released both beta and alpha Java versions to the public.. In fact I still have my Java 1.0 Unleashed book, which I'm looking at right now.
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!