Tutorial Get The Dreamhost Stats Page Working on a WordPress Site

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For websites hosted with Dreamhost, you have an analytics page by default at yoursite.tld/stats/. WordPress can interfere with this, thinking that you are trying to link to a page or category and give you a generated 404 page instead.

Simply add this to your .htaccess file ABOVE the typical # BEGIN WordPress stuff to get it working again.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(stats|failed_auth\.html).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [L]
</IfModule>

Tutorial Force Files to Download (Not Open in Browser)

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AddType application/octet-stream .csv
AddType application/octet-stream .xls
AddType application/octet-stream .doc
AddType application/octet-stream .avi
AddType application/octet-stream .mpg
AddType application/octet-stream .mov
AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

Tutorial Force Favicon Requests to Correct Location

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For whatever crazy reason, perhaps evil-doing site scanners, requets to a web server for a favicon in all known crevasses of the site are fairly common. Since that file probably only actually exists in the root directory of your site, these requests result in a 404. If you server up a fancy, user-friendly 404 page, this can add up to a ton of bandwidth for no good reason.

This code will make those requests serve up the real favicon instead, saving bandwidth:

# REDIRECT FAVICON.ICO
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon\.ico [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} favicon\.ico    [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://css-tricks.com/favicon.ico [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

Another common one is requests for a file called ajax-loader.gif, probably evil scanning looking for poorly made ajax applications in which to exploit. Make sure that file really does exist and force all requets for it to that real location.

# REDIRECT AJAX-LOADER
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/ajax\-loader\.gif [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ajax\-loader\.gif           [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://css-tricks.com/images/ajax-loader.gif [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

Tutorial Force Correct content-type for XHTML Documents

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Most webservers serve XHTML content as text/html what is definitly the right way to handle XHTML documents. In case the server isn't doing that correctly, you can force it on Apache servers with .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml\s*;\s*q=0
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.html$
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} HTTP/1\.1
RewriteRule .* - "[T=application/xhtml+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1]"

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Tutorial Force charset utf-8

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If you can not change the configuration of Apache server, use this code to force decoding of page to utf-8.

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

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Tutorial Fancy Indexing

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Adds fixed width fonts, file size and date, sort capability. Propagates to higher level directories. See example.

IndexOptions FancyIndexing
IndexOptions FoldersFirst
IndexOptions NameWidth=*

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Tutorial Different Directory Index Page

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Normally index.html or index.php is the default page a server serves up when visiting a directory without specifying a file name. You can change this with .htaccess:

DirectoryIndex index2.html