Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.

Speeding up site loading

Came across this small post about improving the speed of a web site which I thought might be of interest to some.

It mentions the compression of JavaScript files using gzip by entering the following command in the .htaccess file.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript

This doesn’t apply to our particular site since we already make use of the feature which is automatically inserted into the .htaccess file by Akeeba Admin Tools Pro by turning on "Automatically compress static resources" in the .htaccess maker

Handling Googlebot URL detected errors.

GoogleWe tend to use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor our main site and in particular the Crawl Errors that it detects.  Sometimes we are a little confused as to where the errors are coming from since the 'source' URL is sometimes the self same page indicated as in error, and others indicate pages where we fail to find the link referenced as in error.

That said it has proved generally useful and mostly they are trivial to fix.  What it has been difficult to discover, is a good reference guide to the topic of Search Engine Friendly URLs known as SEF. Whilst acknowledging that the subject of SEF can be quite involved, our searches have yet to reveal a good comprehensive article upon the best design and implementation mechanisms. It is even more difficult to discover a good guide to resolving problems. Having found nothing suitable we decided to create this post as a record of our investigations and perhaps act as a guide for others.

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Problem remote posting blog entry with htaccess rule - resolved.

I recently implemented the strict htaccess rules generated by the Akeeba Admin Tools utility.   I then discovered that it was not possible to use Windows Live Writer to post entries to the blog anymore.   It was obviously a problem with the htaccess rules since a simple test removing the htaccess file enabled a post to complete successfully.

Looking at the configuration in more detail the most obvious cause appeared to be two rules related to access the xmlrpc directory:

RewriteRule ^xmlrpc/(index\.php)?$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^xmlrpc/ - [F]

But these rules permit access, they do not deny access. so they were obviously not the cause of the problem.

Then the light dawned.  There was a rule to redirect www addresses to non-www addresses:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R,L]

Because the Windows Live Writer (WLW) blog account was set up before the htaccess setting were changed it was set up to use the ‘www.xxxx’ address NOT the ‘xxxx’ address.

For this reason the posting was being disallowed.   The redirection was getting in the way.  Just disabling this one rule enabled the posting to proceed.  It was desirable to have the rule in place, so once I had changed the WLW blog account to use the non-www address posting could resume and complete successfully.

I hope others find this interesting and perhaps do not spend as much time as I have trying to resolve it.

I thoroughly recommend Akeeba Admin Tools Professional as a user since it has stopped SPAM on the site almost completely.  That alone is a triumph.

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