The htaccess gives you the ability to redirect the visitor to different pages if they try to access an invalid page. You can use a custom error page for any type of error as long as you know its number. using custom error page helps lot to increase the performence in Search Engine Optimizaton.

To know detailed http error codes refer to my previous post.to work out this you need to add these htaccess command to your httaccess file and include in your server root folder.

To know how to user htaccess file please refere to my previouse post.

Example: 404 Page Not Found. The layout for this command is :

ErrorDocument errornumber /filename.html

So if you create a page called NotFound.html and you wanted to use it as the 404 error page, the command would be :

ErrorDocument 404 /NotFound.html

If you want to keep all of the error pages in a separate directory, just include the directory name in the file path :

ErrorDocument 404 /errorpages/NotFound.html

The most used error documents are :

400 Bad Request A generic kind of error that people get into by doing some strange stuff with your URL or scripts.

401 Authorization Required When someone tries to enter a protected area without proper authorization.

403 Forbidden When a file with permissions not allowing it to be accessed by the user is requested.

404 Not Found Kinda obvious.

500 Internal Server Error This may help you with internal server errors in any scripts you have running.

There are many others, To view complete http error code see my previous post.

we know that web servers and web client uses mostly common protocol is HTTP, we need use response codes in our application . So i made a simple and breif reference below

Successful Client Requests

200 OK
201 Created
202 Accepted
203 Non-Authorative Information
204 No Content
205 Reset Content
206 Partial Content

Client Request Redirected

300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Moved Temporarily
303 See Other
304 Not Modified
305 Use Proxy

Client Request Errors

400 Bad Request
401 Authorization Required
402 Payment Required (not used yet)
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable (encoding)
407 Proxy Authentication Required
408 Request Timed Out
409 Conflicting Request
410 Gone
411 Content Length Required
412 Precondition Failed
413 Request Entity Too Long
414 Request URI Too Long
415 Unsupported Media Type

Server Errors

500 Internal Server Error
501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
505 HTTP Version Not Supported

We know the impotence of the Search Engine Friendly URLs . To make an application SEF preferable we must have .htaccess permissions and mod_rewrite module enabled.

Here we discuss if apache web server mod_rewrite module enabled or not.

Step1: Open your note pad and pate below code in it and Save as phpinfo.php.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Step2: Now preview this page and find the “mod_rewrite” in the column of “Loaded modules”.

Step3: If we found this we enabled mod_rewrite module.

Step4:if we didn’t found ,we can enable it by reading my previous article.

Before enabling this module for SEF URL s ,we must have permission to use .htaccess file .Please read my previous post to enable .htacess.

Before beginning this article ,please back up your apache configuration file httpd.conf file located in apache installation.

Now open with note pad this configuration file and find the below the lin

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Now remove the “#” symbol in the above line,results modified looks below

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Now Save the file and restart the apache now mod_rewrite module is enabled.

we know that htaccess permission must on apache web server like making SEF urls, directory permissions..etc.here we discuss about how to check .htaccess enabled.

Before we begin this tutorial, please make sure you make a backup copy of the original httpd.conf apache configuration file located in apache installation folder in case we make a mistake, this way we can always go back to the original configuration file

Now open

httpd.conf

file with note pad and find the below text

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride none
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Satisfy all
</Directory>

Then replace AllowOverride none to AllowOverride All. Modified version looks as below

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride all
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Satisfy all
</Directory>

Above change tells the apache to use .htaccess as per directory bases.
Now we can use .htaccess files .

Remember

Remember while uploading .htaccess file to remote server make sure the file transfer in ASCII mode, generally with windows operating system FTP programs use binary mode.

Generally FTP programs doesn’t display the .htaccess files by default ,we must force the FTP program to show hidden files like .htaccess files.

When you save .htaccess file with note pad it saves as .htaccess.txt .Make sure .htaccess is a file extension not a file name with empty name.

In our real time,we work mostly small websites where limited static files are hosted. So in that case we waste additional money for less than a Mb files. Here we learn simple hack how to add multiple sites to single account using single .htaccess file.

For example, if you are hosting your domain name "maheshchari.com" with us and added a Domain Alias for "mahesh.com", then http://www.maheshchari.com and http://www.mahesh.com would take a visitor to the exact same pages of maheshchari.com website. http://maheshchari.com/somefile.html would bring someone to the exact same page as http://mahesh.com/somefile.html.

Using this method, you can host an additional website within your account for each Domain you add. Or you can point the mahesh.com same as maheshchari.com,So you are adding "A" same for both domains in DNS management .

After that This is a custom configuration requiring a couple extra steps.

After Pointing both domain to same Server IP , then place an .htaccess file in /htdocs/www of the following example format:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}  mahesh.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mahesh/.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  /mahesh/$1

Then, upload your HTML files maheshchari.com to /htdocs/www/ and your HTML files for mahesh.com to /htdocs/www/mahesh

Remeber you can’t add emails for mahesh.com for that .

We know the fact that present content available in the internet is from web applications not web site!  We see many advanced Server side scripts like PHP, Perl, and Java etc. that generates most of the dynamic content on the web.
For example http://www.wikipedia.org/ is a largest data collection or knowledge base. This data can be found through URL on the web. So URL is the key point to dynamic content. Generally we do this with a dynamic parameters append to URL and fetch the data from the server according to parameter. We can also use it for short time, like user activation, forgot password, reset password. So we have some information about URL.

Here we discuss about the length of the URL of the web site. As web developer we ensure that our web application work in all web browsers, all plat forms and all server. Off course it is difficult to ensure it, but we work at least an environment like lowest version of the browser, server, and operating system.

Dyamic URL

Example URL:
http://www.maheshchari.com/products/items.php?id=x&model=y&variety=z
http://www.maheshchari.com/activatepage.php?username=x&email=y&reset=z ….etc

Disadvantages

• the length of the URL must work at least IE6, that accepts max length of 2083.
• Some servers like Apache sends HTTP 413 error, not sure it depends for different versions and plat forms.Long URLs usually break when quoted in an e-mail message, and then don’t work.
• In the above URL the data x, y, z vary to different situations, so it may exceed limit.
• It leads some times as security issue.
• user can’t remember and type the URL

Best practices

• make ensure the data is less.
• user URL shortening web services.
• encode number of parameters to single parameters.

To make small URL with PHP see how we implement it below code

encoding to Short URL

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//making uniform data length link
//we encrypt user data to base 64 codeformat and urlencode format
$param=urlencode(base64_encode('username=x&email=y&reset=z'));
$url='http://www.websitename.com/activate.php?param='.$param;
echo $url;
//output is:http://www.websitename.com/activate.php?param=dXNlcm5hbWU9eCZlbWFpbD15JnJlc2V0PXo%3D 
//we can also  use available url shortening web services like tiny.url ..etc
//they provide like tinyurl.com/xeuess

Decoding to long URL

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// decoding and parse to GET method
$getparam=$_GET['param'];
$decoded_param=base64_decode(urldecode($getparam));
echo $decoded_param;
//output :username=x&email=y&reset=z
//we delete this $_GET['param']
//re assign global $_GET variable
parse_str($decoded_param,$_GET);
echo $_GET['username'];
//output is: x

Static URL

Example URL

http://www.maheshchari.com/articles/how-to-become-a-rich-man-with-in-one-day-by-author-example/

http://www.maheshchari.com/articles/worlds-largest-mountains-in-india-and-other-countries-polls-for-2000/

It is a well-known fact nowadays that without SEO a Web site stands many chances of not being indexed by search spiders. that results poor conversion rate.my colleague who is SEO expert had this type issue in past, that he used like above URL in his SEO or search engine optimization as it gives more chances of indexing in most search engine. but result is poor.but it wrong since he gave full URL and the page content is not much relevant to this URL. it may leads some times penalize or some times it may be spammed.

Best practices

• Keep URL small as possible as less than 5 to 6 words and make it for human readable not for bots
• Keep URL most relevant to the content.
• Keep highest keyword starting position even though grammatical mistake.
• There is some online web services available that suggests URL according to the content.
• Use URL shortening web services while campaign .