What are regular expressions?
A regular expression is a special string used to describe or match a search pattern or set of strings. Regular expressions use certain syntax rules as outlined in the section below, “Basic regular expressions syntax”.
Regular expression can be abbreviated as:
Plural forms of regular expressions are:
There are several methods to password protect a web page, some are more secure than others. One method is by using cookies and PHP, an example of this is the php script developed by Zann Marketing, Simple Authorization Script (SAS). This small and simple script allows users to password protect web pages without using a database. This feature of SAS is great for webmasters who do not have access to databases such as MySQL.
Although SAS is quite “secure”, it is not the most secure form of password protection. The most secure form of password protection is through the use of .htaccess and .htpasswd files. (Read more…)
There are 2 ways of getting your .html pages to parse PHP, this is via:
In both methods above, you need to make sure that your server supports PHP.
Which method to choose?
For most webmasters who uses shared hosting and do not have access to their server’s configuration files, you would use method one, via .htaccess. If you have access to your server’s configuration files, that is, you have a dedicated server and can access httpd.conf, then use method two, via httpd.conf.
Image hotlinking is when another web site links to your images (usually without your permission or knowledge). Most webmasters don’t appreciate others linking to their images as this uses up their bandwidth and can end up costing the webmaster quite some money.
Using htaccess a mod rewrites, you can:
Firstly, before you start any rewrites, make sure your rewrite engine is turned on. The following line of code should be one of the first lines in your .htaccess file, before any RewriteCond, RewriteRule and redirect, etc.
RewriteEngine On
To permanently redirect a single page, simply add the line:
redirect 301 old-url new-url
To permanently redirect your root page, for example, you have chosen http://www.yourdomain.com/ as your root page and want all requests to http://yourdomain.com/ to permanently redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com/, use the following code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\..* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\..+ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Web servers have a default error document that it serves in cases of requests for pages that don’t exist. One can create a custom error document and tell the web server to use the custom error document instead of its default error document.
Steps to take to use a custom error document
ErrorDocument 404 /your_error_document.html
The DirectoryIndex directive sets the URL to be returned when the index of a directory is requested by a visitor, that is, when a visitor specifies a / at the end of the directory name.
http://www.zann-marketing.com/
When there is a request for the index of a directory, the server usually returns the URL index.html. By using DirectoryIndex, one can specify a different URL to be returned when the index of a directory is requested, eg index_2.html.
Example:
DirectoryIndex index_2.html
In the above example, when the index of the directory is requested, the server will return the URL index_2.html, instead of index.html.
One can specify more than one URL for the DirectoryIndex and the server will return the first URL it finds. For example:
DirectoryIndex index.html home.html start.html
In the example above, the server will try to return index.html first, and if index.html isn’t found, then it will try to return home.html, and if that fails, it will try to return start.html.
