Quick Tip: Point Visitors in the Right Direction With .htaccess

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.

View Screencast

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+