Solution:

Step 1:

Create a PHP file, in this case we are naming it document_root.php. The PHP file should contain the following code (Make sure to replace our path with your path to your document root):

<?php
$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] = "/usr/local/www/htdocs/domainname.com/www";
?>

Step 2:

Add the following code at the top of your .htaccess file (Make sure to replace the document_root.php with your file. If your file is nested in a directory include the file path as well):

php_value auto_prepend_file "document_root.php"

Reload your website and poof, Apache will parse the document_root.php file and set the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] value on every page you load.

Note: If you are redefining a different global variable or multiple global variables you can revise the PHP file accordingly.

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1. How to Detect a User’s Language with PHP I was recently looking for a simple way to automatically...
2. Remove Unnecessary Querystring From .htaccess 301 Permanent Redirects Today I ran into an odd problem while trying to...

To illustrate the problem. I was attempting to rewrite /old-page to http://www.website.com/new-page and when the redirection occurred I would get something along the address of http://www.website.com/new-page/?url=old-page.

I couldn’t figure out a solution for the problem using standard redirects such as:

Redirect 301 /old-url http://www.website.com/new-url

I tried different variations and position and nothing seemed to work. After some experimentation I decided to approach the problem from another direction. Instead I created a RewriteRule to handle the rewriting and then included two designations [L] indicating this is the final rule and to tell apache to stop looking for additional rules if this condition is met and then I specified [R=301] indicating this is 301 redirect. (CAUTION: Do not just use [R] as this is recorded as 302 redirect which is not a preferred redirect type for SEO)

The final redirect looks like this in .htaccess and seems to work as expected.

RewriteRule ^old-url?/?$ http://www.website.com/new-url [L,R=301]

There are likely other ways to approach this problem but this one is working great for me. Let me know if you have any problems implementing this methodology into your .htaccess file.

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1. How to Detect a User’s Language with PHP I was recently looking for a simple way to automatically...

I put together a quick snippet below that extracts the two digit language code and stores it as a variable. You could use this to load different content, to redirect to another version of the website using the proper language, or to sculpt the user experience.

<?PHP 
 
    //EXTRACT THE TWO DIGIT LANGUAGE CODE FROM THE HTTP HEADERS
    $lang = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], 0, 2);
 
?>

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ALTER TABLE table AUTO_INCREMENT = 1000;

(Where 1000 is the number you would like to start the auto incrementing at)

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Original
Below is the original script that had the problem with larger files, it works great with local files and also with short remote files. Check it out here:

<?PHP
	$file = fopen("http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt", "rb");
	$output = fread($file, 8192);
	fclose($file);
	echo($output);
?>

Improved
If you have a longer file then you can solve the packet issue by concatenating the file together in several groupings. An example of the revised and working script has been included below:

<?PHP
	$file = fopen("http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt", "rb");
	$output = '';
	while (!feof($file)) {
	 	$output .= fread($file, 8192);
	}
	fclose($file);
	echo($output);
?>

Note: I have no idea what the text file used in this example is for. I just grabbed it from a Google search because it was large enough to demonstrate the problem I am illustrating.

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Years ago I had a software program that would copy down an entire HTML site fairly accurately. Unfortunately, as the web transitioned to dynamic websites this software package could not keep up with the advances.

Today, I discovered a website backup utility that has done a fantastic job in my tests. I backed up several of our complicated dynamic websites and it has done a great job making them work in an HTML version. If you run into a situation where your website, or your customers website is being held hostage by a web design company this could be the perfect solution for you.

The software is called HTTrack Website Copier and it is a free GPL licensed software package.

Click here to download HTTrack

If you have any comments or questions please leave a comment below.

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AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

For web servers funning PHP as CGI

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

If you happen to be running IIS this can still be done but it is a bit more difficult and a topic for another post on another day.

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JavaScript function to determine if the current browser is IE6:

//CHECK FOR IE6
function is_ie6(){
     return ((window.XMLHttpRequest == undefined) && (ActiveXObject != undefined));
}

There are many other ways to find IE6 but this one works great. If you have another good method please list it in the comments below.

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One of the major benefits of using a .inc file as opposed to a PHP file is that a .inc will not execute code when called directly from the browser and instead displays the file contents as a text. This technique can help portions of your script from being run out of context by clever hackers. The downside to this functionality is that since Apache, by default treats a .inc file as a text file it will send the contents of your file to the browser. This can obviously pose a serious security risk to your application. For example, a connection.inc file containing database connection information called directly would output the connection information for your application allowing a hacker direct access to your database.

Thankfully, there is an easy solution to this problem. Apache allows you to provide special instructions in your httpd.conf file to disallow direct access to an .inc file. This prevents a user from executing it outside the context of another script and prevents the file from being sent as text. To disallow access to .inc files, add the following information to your httpd.conf:

<files "*.inc">
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

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