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.
To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!
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..
After many years of using any and all terminal emulators out there, from xterm to the Gnome terminal, to KDE Konsole to xfce4-terminal, lxterminal, vte, yakuake, rote, roxterm, sakura, terminator, and putty I finally I settled in for the long-haul with rxvt (rxvt-unicode).
My BOX: Slim -> Ratpoison -> URxvt -> Tmux -> Bash
Apache Web Server users have problems getting Apache Authentication/password-protection in htaccess working, this is a troubleshooting guide to get Password Protection working!
....
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
....
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.)
I've tried 100's of Anti-virus, Anti-Rootkit, and Anti-Spyware tools over the last 10 years, but it's always good to re-examine your system's security every couple of months.
If you desire SPEED from your WordPress blog, the #1 speed improvement comes from using the WP-Cache Plugin. If you still desire SPEED after installing the Plugin, you can modify the WP-Cache Plugin code to make your blog even faster!
This simple unix shell script automatically creates backups of a specific folder at regular hourly, nightly, weekly, and monthly intervals. Instead of the usual method for copying directory trees using tar with fifo, pipes, rsync, or NFS methods this script uses cpio which is much much faster and has cool options like saving m/a/c times, symlinks, relative paths, and weird file names.
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
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that give you a very good level of anonymity, using Tor with privoxy and FoxTor for firefox gives you privacy at the touch of a button.
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.
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.
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.
Looking for some advanced uses for the shell? Here is some of my best. The shell is where 70% of my work takes place, and I have at least one terminal open almost 100% of the time, for viewing tailing color-coded logs, and of course for the SSH Tunnels that I use to route various networking through, like my email. So I decided that to standardize and create a bash_profile containing the most time-saving and helpful functions that I could use on all the various hosting environments would really be some sweet sugar, so here is my constant Work-in-progress.
It works for all shells I encounter, including BackTrack, Debian, Knoppix, Arch Linux, etc. Also works for many hosting environments I use including DreamHost, HostGator, WiredTree, and pretty much any linux VPS.
I also rely on this heavily from within shell scripts I write to access all the functions and stuff in this .bash_profile, and to do that I just do like:
#!/bin/bash source ~/.bash_profile &>/dev/nulll pm "PM is a function to output nice messages with color" yn "Are you enjoying the shell" && pm "Thats great!" || pm "Perhaps you're better suited for DOS" yn "Show Calendar" && aa_calendar yn "Show Fortune" && aa_fortune
The machine itself is super super ultra-thin, wafer thin, very cool looking. It's crazy light, I was amazed how slick it looked when it arrived.
Huge amount of open-source hardware/chipsets/etc.. The first time I went through the dmesg I was smiling. 2 USB 3.0 ports, and they actually work as promised, very very fast transfer speeds to my USB 3.0 external SSD. Incredible speed, boot time is the fastest I've ever seen. Starts at $720, mine was $1,800
You may not think much about verifying your website with these search engines, but I am of the opinion it is extremely good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In fact, I read the other day on Google that if you buy a domain with a checkered past that has been punished by the search engines and you want it to be reincluded in the index this is what they recommended. Verify your sites.
Wouldn't it be great if you could use php and curl to download multiple files simultaneously using built-in curl functions? You can!
A souped-up version of the Apache printenv script for hard-core server environment debuggery.
#!/bin/sh
echo -e "Content-type: text/plainnn"
...
__T "CURRENT PROCESS CMDLINE"
{
for p in `echo /proc/[0-9]*/cmdline`;
do
pid=${p:6:$((${#p}-13))}
[[ $pid == $PPID || $pid == $$ ]] && continue;
__M "[ /proc/$pid ]";
sed 's/x00/ /g;G' $p 2>/dev/null
done
}
fi
AskApache Password Protect adds some serious password protection to your WordPress Blog. Not only does it protect your wp-admin directory, but also your wp-includes, wp-content, plugins, etc. plugins as well. Imagine a HUGE brick wall protecting your frail .php scripts from the endless attacks of automated web robots and password-guessing exploit-serving scripts.
For the good of your followers,
for the good of mankind,
and for our own enjoyment,
we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.
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).
This is really useful for me because I work with dozens of different database servers. The first thing I do is run this command and paste it into the servers /etc/my.cnf file. That way I will always know the original value and it just makes life much easier.
$ mysql -NBe 'SHOW VARIABLES' |sed 's,\t,^=,'|column -ts^|tr "\n" '@'|eval $(echo "sed '" "s,@\("{a..z}"\),\n\n\1,;" "'")|tr '@' "\n"|sed 's,^,# ,g'
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?
Before
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8' init_connect='SET CHARACTER SET=utf-8'
After
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci,NAMES utf8'
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.
Time-dependant rewriting uses mod_rewrite and apache server time variables to display different files depending on the time, while the URL stays the same. An often requested implementation of this is to display a different home page or image depending on if its morning, noon, or night.
This is awesome. I was so fed up with trying to find a fail-proof, cross-platform way to find the mime type of an image using PHP that I wrote a quick function that utilizes the same technology as the exif_imagetype, getimagesize, and finfo functions do. Ahh the joys of low-level.
Here's the problem I was having while working on a custom theme for a client. Certain pages, posts, tag pages, archive pages, and custom pages either had the sidebar, or did not have the sidebar. The main content div #ContentW had a 72% width when the sidebar was present, otherwise it was 96%. The problem was that I dislike having to do things manually when they can be automated through code. What I was having to do was manually add/remove page-specific classes to the css file to reflect whether the sidebar was present on that page or not.