Today we're going to cover a few simple tricks you can perform with your .htaccess file which will make your visitors that bit happier.

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Snippets

Firstly, it's likely you'll want to direct your visitors to a definite location, irrespective of the exact url they enter. This can be taken a step further by specifying friendly urls. Lastly, we make sure that directory listing is disabled, preventing users from browsing the contents of our directories.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

        # For security reasons, Option followsymlinks cannot be overridden.
        Options +FollowSymLinks
	RewriteEngine on

	# Restrict your site to only one domain
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^justinhubbard\.me$
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://justinhubbard.me/$1 [L]
	
	# Friendly URL
	RedirectMatch 301 http://justinhubbard.me/blog/index.php?work=websites(.*) 
        http://justinhubbard.me/blog/websites/$1
	
	# Make sure directory listing is disabled
	Options All -indexes

</IfModule>

This final snippet enables the Gzip module. Gzip compresses your files server-side, before sending them to the browser for extraction. As you can imagine, this speeds up download times quite significantly..

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
  mod_gzip_on Yes
  mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
  mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
  mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

Additional Resources

• 5 Fun and Practical Htaccess Solutions on Nettuts+
• .htaccess Files for the Rest of Us on Nettuts+
• The Ultimate Guide to .htaccess Files on Nettuts+
• Using htaccess Files for Pretty URLS on (wait for it) Nettuts+