Speed up yor website - Part 1

Assets such as stylesheets, images and videos are often the major hit taken by a webserver when a webpage is loaded. I’m often trying to improve my page loads by using published pages (flat html) and rewrites, so I don’t need to run a dynamic page when it’s not necessary.

5 min read

Apache 101 - Are you rotating your logs?

It came to my attention today that my website was serving blank pages, and I got really intrigued with it. I checked the memory, and everything was fine, and my logs wouldn’t indicate any obvious error. I did a quick research, and some people were saying this happens due to your log files being full which cause your OS’s open file to go nuts, and you run out of file slots. 

By running out of slots, your Apache starts serving blank pages, and won’t work properly either. A quick way around to it, is cleaning up your logs.

2 min read

Apache 101 - Avoiding duplicate content on your domain.

Did you know that search engines consider things like http://www.placona.co.uk/index.cfm and  http://placona.co.uk/index.cfm as duplicate content? It might sound like a wise thing to do, as your site would be accessible by whichever URL related to your domain. I’ll say here it’s not, as search engines like Google consider this an offense and will penalize you should they think you’re doing it on purpose.

Google normally are very strict and harsh with people trying to “play” with their search engine, or people who try to black hat SEO. And content duplication might be just what will put your domain on the bottom of their search.

2 min read

Installing YUM on CentOS 5

This is really for my future reference, but I thought someone would bump into that any time. I’m configuring a new CentOS 5 server and for my surprise it didn’t come with yum installed.

~1 min read

Full Google Mail / SMTP power for your domain

I’ve recently been playing with Google apps for domains, where it lets you create Gmail based emails for your domain. Basically you can configure Google apps to manage your domain’s email therefore saving a few things. The first few that spring to mind are:

5 min read

Sync your iPhone with Outlook (or Google) Calendar

We all know how painful it is to keep up to date with our meeting and

obligations. I’ve recently been thinking of a nice way to sync my calendars

from work and personal into a single account.

I then had a very specific spec for it, which is as follows:

3 min read

Apache 101 - Compressing Files

I’m going to start a server configuration series here, where I’ll be talking about my goals and frustrations when configuring my own webserver. As most of you know, I’ve been using my own VPS for the last two weeks, and promised to post everything about it here.

4 min read