It took a kick form outside to realise things were going downhill.

So – with the help of the good folk at Yahoo YSlow and the new copy-cat-kid on the block (Google Page Speed) with their plug-ins for a plug-in(firebug) for Firefox [oh the irony]… I’ve started to get things in line again.

Both YSlow and Page Speed have helpful links and information once called – and now I can pat myself on the back for having improved my YSlow scores from an ‘F’ to a ‘B’. Wetware heh.

Main issues I was able were too fix were too many HTTP requests and a lack of explicit caching direction from the web server. Nextly I’ll be looking at getting interface elements into a sprites for future jobs. (Must take this sprite/CSS creation tool for a spin. Looks absolutely fab.)

Reduce HTTP requests

While combining CSS files is trivial, combining a bunch of disparate JS files into one is not painless – I’ve had to drop a jQuery tooltip plug-in as it wouldn’t play nice when bundled up with its playground compatriots.

Server side caching and compression

is achieved the following htaccess rules:

##Cacheing static components

FileETag none
Header unset Etag

# Far future 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|mp3|mp4|css|js)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "scripts.inc.php$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

# Past last modified
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|mp3|mp4|css|js)$">
Header set last-modified "Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "scripts.inc.php$">
Header set last-modified "Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

#Compress
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

Shadowbox woes

I now may be on the lookout for a replacement to Shadowbox. Shadowbow v2 was great – it came with lots of build options and could be explicitly launched by jQuery on Document Ready. v2 wasn’t IE8 compatible however – forcing an upgrade to v3 – still in beta… Ho hum. This required an updated version of the JW FLV media player which I’m not mad keen on – and that needs a new licence. While Shadowbox is now very clever and can automatically find it’s own dependencies – it has many of these – each one with an HTTP request. While it is easy to combine the whole bundle into a single file its something I’d rather not have to do/keep track of – I’ve already got a rod for my back with the other jQuery plugins…

Adapted from Marco’s Webdev Notepad

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^83\.57\.178\.37$
RewriteRule !maintenance/index.html /maintenance/index.html [L,NC,R=302]

From Ask Apache (I like)

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.sub.domain.com/
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 83.57.178.37

I love his understated way. While the debate about these services – and, as an adjunct, feed scraping, we should look to our webdev monkey skills to roll our own solutions. He, yer Zeldman, doesn’t state as much in B&W but his example shows his own tiny URL. How? The simple redirect.

Whether or not this is done with a mod_rewrite rule or by any means necessary [dreams of CMS modules in my mind] – the fact is that it is easy a pie to make your own Tiny URLs and publish them hand in hand with the original article. Every article should have a permalink and a short version.

Of course – the redirect solution presupposes your domain isn’t www.pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.com…

We *heart* canonical URIs

[Note - I've recently come accross a web hosting company that disallows Options +FollowSymLinks. When used their server throws an internal error page - you may need to replace with the more secure (on shared hosting systems anyway) Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch ]

Get rid of those pesky Ws.

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Or as you may well prefer – reinstate them

The SEO boys, they say “www“.

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

…rewrite continued:

#redirect all .html pages to .php
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]

Redirects

#specific page redirects - PERMANENT
redirect 301 /example-page.html http://example.com/new-name.html
#specific page redirects- TEMPORARY
redirect 302 /example-page.html http://example.com/new-name.html

Spell checker

Thanks to Jens Meiert This little line will allow a single typo in your users’ URIs (guess who just discovered that “URL” is a depreciated term):
CheckSpelling On

Get rid of any instances of “index.html”. And more

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php) HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index.(html?|php)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Add trailing slashes where they may have been missed…

Thanks to Webmaster World

# If final URL-path-part does not contain a period or end with a slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[^/]*|/)$
# Redirect to add a trailing slash
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

more…

Set PDFs to download rather than open in browser

#option for PDFs to download rather than open
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

Disable directory browsing

# disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes

Redirect denied directory listings etc to standard error page

# redirect denied directory listings etc to standard error page
ErrorDocument 403 /404-redirect.html
ErrorDocument 404 /404-redirect.html

Ease versioning of CSS files (+)

Will also improve history viewing with GitX

Note: this assumes a naming convention of, for example /css/filename.1234.css. Other dots will break this fragile little fellow.
#Rules for Versioned Static Files
RewriteRule ^(scripts|css)/(.+)\.(.+)\.(js|css)$ $1/$2.$4 [L]