RAGARD | Simple Themes & Tutorials

I just did a little google search and found a lot of .htaccess tricks that you might want to use for your websites. Those who are new to .htaccess Password Robot Blog has a good quick introduction. There’s also a online .htaccess editor that can be useful available in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and more.

Don’t forget that if you or the person you know is working on the server has a root access to the server you could do the same thing without using .htaccess, which is recommended.

Custom 404 Error Pages

Whenever your visitors access to the page on your site that doesn’t exist, they get an error saying “Page Cannot be Found” which is not user-friendly. Here’s a sample on how to use your custom page:

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ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

You could make it like this too:

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ErrorDocument 404 http://www.ragard-jp.com/en/404.html

Need some ideas on how to design a 404 error pages? Smashing Magazine has some smashing 404 error pages listed.

Redirect Visitors

Sometimes you don’t want your visitors to see you working on the website. Instead you would like to show them a page telling that you are updating or still under construction. Here’s the code that can let you do that:

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order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.456.789.101
 
ErrorDocument 403 /update.html
 
<Files update.html>
allow from all
</Files>

Make sure to change 123.456.789.101 to your IP address and change update.html to the file name you would like to display to your visitors.

Change Home Directory

Usually when visitors types in the url to your site, by default they will land on index.html, index.php, or index.htm. You could actually change the file you would like to display:

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DirectoryIndex new.html

Change new.html to any file you would like to have as your home directory.

Prevent Directory Browsing

When you don’t have any index pages in your directory, visitors can easily see what you have inside. To prevent this you could simply make a blank index.html on every single directory or just set up using .htaccess:

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Options All -Indexes

Protecting Data Files

If your using a script that saves data or log you need to make sure that it is secured. If you have information about your customers, people can download the data or log file by just accessing from the browser. You can protect it easily:

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<Files ~ "\.(dat|log|csv)$">
deny from all
</Files>

Not to worry, your cgi or php can access the data files like before.

Force To Download Files

Have you ever had a problem visitors streaming your media files instead of downloading? With this code you can force your visitors to download even when they left click. Just try it and you will see how sweet this is:

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AddType application/octet-stream .avi 
AddType application/octet-stream .mpg
AddType application/octet-stream .mov
AddType application/octet-stream .mp3
AddType application/octet-stream .wma
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

It even works for pdf files!

Tags: .htaccess