HTACCESS Tutorials

Welcome to the .htaccess tutorials section of the Rapid Purple blog. The following tutorials are aimed to give you an introduction to creating and working with an .htaccess file; along with a few useful tips and tricks every webmaster should be familiar with. Creating An .HTACCESS File First things first. Before you can start using […]

Denying Site Access

Denying and allowing access to your website can be accomplished very easily with .htaccess. In order to block an IP address you would use the following command within your .htaccess file: deny from 000.000.000.000 Replace 000.000.000.000 with the IP address you wish to block. If you only specify one or two groups of the numbers you […]

Escaping Characters and Variable Expansion

Escaping characters is basic, but essential to an error-free PHP script. Consider the following sentence for example: Mike’s uncle said, “Isn’t that cool?” Now if we attempt to use PHP to echo this sentence to the browser, those quotes and apostrophes will cause some problems. The quotes and apostrophes inside the string are confused for […]

Server Security: Processes and How to Terminate Them

Since Linux is a multi-tasking system, in which many different programs or program threads may be running simultaneously, Linux keeps track of all individual tasks and processes – much like the Task Manager within Windows. Although these processes are usually well-behaved and well-managed by Linux itself – it’s always helpful to be able to know […]

Trojan Port List

Following the recent breach of the popular hosting company, ServerPro, the internet is back to buzzing about trojans and server ports, which it should be. It never should have stopped in the first place. With that in mind – comes this list – listing the majority of the more popular known trojans, and the ports […]

The BASH Shell: Pipelines

Pipelines are a great way to string together a series of commands. This means that the output from the first command in the pipeline is used as the input for the second command in the pipeline. The output from the second command in the pipeline is used as the input to the third command in […]

The BASH Shell: Command History & Aliases

Command History Bash keeps track of a certain number of previous commands that you have entered into the shell. The number of commands is given by a shell variable called HISTSIZE (which we will discuss later on). Bash stores the text of your previous commands in a history list. When you logon to to your […]

The BASH Shell: Wildcards & Command Line Completion

The GNU Bourne-Again SHell (BASH), as the name implies, is an extension of the Bourne shell. It provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) for working on *nix systems and is the most common shell used on Linux systems. Chances are that if you’re managing your own virtual or dedicated server – you’ll end up using […]

Starting Off In Photoshop

Photoshop is an extremely useful tool for anyone working with the internet. From simple screenshots, to complex photo manipulation – it can handle it all – and then some. There is almost no limitation to what you can do with Photoshop – however this also means that there is ALOT to learn when it comes […]

Proper Use of Heading, ALT & Title Tags

[frame align=”left”] [/frame]Improve web design and search engine performance all in one easy step! Believe it or not, it is possible, easy, and really straightforward. There are 3 extremely useful tags and attributes that most people overlook, or do not take advantage of properly. These are the alt tags, title attributes in links and heading […]

Using Custom Extensions

Ever wondered how Google makes some of their pages have the extension .g? This is a fairly easy procedure really, and htaccess does a great deal in helping us accomplish this. First decide what you want the new extension to be, for our purposes we will use the extension of .purple (simply because it makes sense – what […]

Creating Custom Error Pages

One of the most common uses for a .htaccess file is to create custom error pages. The Apache server comes pre-installed with several different error pages, the problem with them is that they are quite frankly…. ugly. In order to use custom error pages we just need to add the following line(s) to our .htaccess file (for […]