The Story of the Very First UNIX Ping Program - 1983

I was insanely jealous when Van Jacobson of LBL used my kernel ICMP support to write TRACEROUTE, by realizing that he could get ICMP Time-to-Live Exceeded messages when pinging by modulating the IP time to life (TTL) field. I wish I had thought of that! :-)

DreamHost Site Of The Month Challenge

Every month a contest called DHSOTM is held for the highest rated website on DreamHost. By winning the contest your site gets SEO and traffic benefits, which I hope to measure soon.

Article: Requiring the WWW

Howto with working code: Require the WWW for SEO using Apache htaccess mod_rewrite, and Windows ISAPI_Rewrite

Top Methods for Faster, Speedier Web Sites

1. Make fewer HTTP requests
   Reducing 304's with Cache-Control Headers
2. Use a CDN
3. Add an Expires header
   Caching with mod_expires on Apache
4. Gzip components
5. Put CSS at the top
6. Move JS to the bottom
7. Avoid CSS expressions
8. Make JS and CSS external
9. Reduce DNS lookups
   Use Static IP address, use a subdomain for static content.
10. Minify JS
    Refactor the code, compress with dojo
11. Avoid redirects
    Use internal redirection with mod_rewrite, The correct way to redirect with 301
12. Remove duplicate scripts
13. Turn off ETags
    In htaccess, FileETag None Header unset ETag
14. Make AJAX cacheable and small

mod_rewrite Fix for Caching Updated Files

Web Developers sometimes use file.ext?v=004 as a version control system to force visitors to use updated files. This is terrible. Instead link to apache-003.css and set it to be cached forever. When you change the file you just change the links to apache-004.css. That eliminates millions of bandwidth and resource robbing If-Modified-Since requests.

Speed Up Sites with htaccess Caching

2 awesome ways to implement caching on your website using Apache .htaccess or httpd.conf. Both methods are extremely simple to set up and will dramatically speed up your site!

Speedy Sites with Image Sprites and CSS Example use of an image sprite with css to speed up your websites drastically. An image sprite is 1 image composed of multiple images, using CSS you can display just one part of the image using background-position.

Using HTTP Headers with htaccess

How would you like to be able to send P3P privacy headers, Content-Type: UTF-8, Content-Language: en-US, etc.. using just htaccess? Now you CAN!

Speed up Google Analytics on your site Uses cronjob every 12 hours to download latests version of googles urchin.js file and serves it locally.

WOW, I served a page for every single HTTP Status Code and saved Headers and Content

There are 57 recognized HTTP Status Codes in the latest version of Apache. But chances are that you will only ever see or hear about 3-6 of them. Well I figured out a neat little hack by looking in the Apache Source Code that will let anyone setup Apache to send ANY HTTP status code for specific requests. I went ahead and performed the requests on all 57 of my special http status code spitting pages. I saved the headers and src for each one, so now you can use this page as a literal map for designing cgi, perl, and php scripts that have custom headers.. Now you will be able to find out what each of those 57 Status Codes do.. and copy them. All of this is possible if you have htaccess setup..

Instruct Search Engines to come back to site after you finish working on it

What do you think Googlebot and other Search Engines do when they try to reach your site while you are tinkering with it?

Nifty SEO tip to get Search Engine Bots to check your site every hour until you finish working on it and tell them you are finished.

What if you could conveniently tell Googlebot and other bots that you are working on the page but you would like them to come back in, oh, say an hour? I know what I did when I found out this was possible.. I found out how to do it and now I'm sharing with you.

Google Analytics Customized 404 Error Page

Using Google Analytics to create a best-practice 404 Error page. HOWTO make it very easy to diagnose and keep track of 404 Error messages from within google analytics.