At first glance, the way the Apache mod_rewrite module handles query strings can be a little intimidating. mod_rewrite works by sitting on your server in a file called htaccess, and “catching” requests for URL‘s. It then checks these URL request against a series of rules and conditions you have set. If the request meets any of the rules and conditions, it applies then necessary changes to the URL, then reprocesses the request with the changes you have directed. Read more – ‘Apache RewriteRule and query strings’.
Restarting Apache on my MacBook Pro today, using the command line argument sudo apachectl -k start resulted in a rather strange error Read more – ‘Apachectl Ulimit Error’.
Compressing your Web components will help speed up your Website. The majority of your visitors will benefit as most all Web browsers support GZip compression. You’ll want to compress all text, which includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, JSON, etc. Read more – ‘How to Configure Apache to GZip Your Components’.
Setting an Expires (or Cache-Control) header in Apache will help speed up your website. I'm running Apache 2.x, and define an expires header for all of the site's static assets (images, stylesheets, and scripts). Read more – ‘How to Set an Expires Header in Apache’.
If you're currently not using Eclipse as your development tool of choice, you certainly should be! Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. Read more – ‘Using Ant with Eclipse’.
An increasingly popular technique among websites and in particular, blogs, is the idea of making URLs search engine friendly, or safe, on the premise that doing so will help search engine optimisation. By removing the obscure query string element of a URL and replacing it with keyword rich alternatives, not only makes it more readable for a human being, but also the venerable robots that allow our page content to be found in the first place. Read more – ‘Enabling Search Engine Safe URLs with Apache and htaccess’.
When trying to install the latest version of Apache on my development machine, I was presented with a nasty error at the end of the installation, that I initially thought related to a previous IIS installation. Read more – ‘Apache Installation – Problems with Skype’.
Installing PHP is a relatively simple task one would think. Indeed it is simple, but configuring the php.ini isn't; at least not so on Windows Vista! It is infuriating when such a relatively simple task is made inordinately complicated because of the nuances of Vista permissions. What started out as a 5 minute task took a significant number of hours searching for a suitable answer on Google, and not only by myself. Read more – ‘PHP.ini Permission Problems on Windows Vista’.
