As planned I spent Sunday working on PrincessLeia.com. I’m quite pleased with the work that was acomplished.
- Went through files in root website directory and removed old/unused files
- Went through CSS, greped all files to figure out what CSS goes with what pages, moved CSS files to own directory and updated pages accordingly
- Edited CSS on index.php and menu pages so the links are easier to see – and pink/purple!
- Used .htaccess to prohibit linking of images and sounds from specific trouble sites (myspace, migente)
- Used .htaccess to set up rules to direct .html requests to .php if .html does not exist and .php does
- Removed custom 404 that pointed to missing.html
Going through the files was not so difficult.
Going through the CSS was a pain in the ass that I’ve been putting off for months.
Setting up the blocking of hotlinking for certain pages was fun. I didn’t want to block all hotlinking, as that means I can’t point people to a princessleia.com/image.jpg, which would suck, and I would be restricted myself as to where I could post my images, having to edit my rules all the time when I want to post somewhere else. But some people steal a considerable amount of bandwidth, like the users on myspace and users on migente who think it’s appropriate to hotlink wav files that play as the page loads *groans at bandwidth usage from that* I redirected image requests to a small image file saying “This image is hosted by princessleia.com hotlinking is prohibited” (I thought about putting up something more perverse, but these people are generally just ignorant, not stealing bandwidth on purpose, and I’m not mean. Besides, I don’t want that practice associated with me). Sound file requests are simply forbidden from certain domains.
Setting up the .html to .php apache redirect was fun too. This will be a great help for when I’m moving all my pages to .php. No broken links! No army of softlinks! Just a little bit of apache rewrite magic. I hope to undertake the site wide move to .php in the near future, site-wide redesigns by just changing a CSS file will be a wonderful thing.
The removal of the custom 404 is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. The trouble with it is that when you type something wrong it redirects you to missing.html, which doesn’t allow for you to fix the typo in your address and get to the correct page, this is very annoying. Besides, I had to take the cute penguin image off the custom page because it was a waste of bandwidth so the page wasn’t terribly exciting anyway.
Plans now? The site-wide conversion to .php that I mentioned. General work on a few sections on the site that were neglected and some not even linked (Heritage Trails project, Family photos project, getting more of my writings from LJ to a home on my site). And I NEED to update my resume in the very near future.