CSS-TricksCSS-Tricks

Append / Prepend Files

Chris Coyier — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:26:04 +0000

Rather than having to call / include a file you need on every single page, you can have them automatically prepended (top of file) or appended (bottom of file) automatically through your .htaccess file.

php_value auto_prepend_file "/real/path/to/file/functions.php"
php_value auto_append_file "/real/path/to/file/footer.php"

Subdirectories URL Internally Redirect to Query String

Chris Coyier — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:17:13 +0000

The URL in the browser would be:

http://css-tricks.com/index.php/teachers/a/

The actual page rendered by the server would be:

http://css-tricks.com/index.php?search=teachers&sort=a

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index/([^/]+)/([^/]+).php /page.php?search=$1&sort=$2 [NC]

PHP Error Logging

Chris Coyier — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:29:45 +0000

Log errors to a file, and prevent showing them to the user. Make sure that the file exists and youre able to write to it.

# display no errs to user
php_flag display_startup_errors off
php_flag display_errors off
php_flag html_errors off
# log to file
php_flag log_errors on
php_value error_log /location/to/php_error.log

iPad Detection

Chris Coyier — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:22:48 +0000

Of course, the iPad is a pretty large screen and a fully capable browser, so most websites don't need to have iPad specific versions of them. But if you need to, you can detect for it with .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*iPad.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ipad.yourdomain.com [R=301]

This will redirect iPad users to a URL you specify. This is probably the best way to do it (assuming you are running an Apache server), but if you aren't, there are PHP and JavaScript methods here.

Force Correct content-type for XHTML Documents

Chris Coyier — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:17:00 +0000

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]"