ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • How To Detect Mobile Visitors Using .htaccess Rewrite Rules, Simplified

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    Since my original posts on mobile redirection in .htaccess files I’ve gotten some comments and emails asking for step-by-step guidance on exactly how to “install” these rules. I hope this post will answer some of those questions.

    Before you continue reading, if you have php installed on your server, you may want to consider Andy Moore’s php based detection solution.

    The Basics

    First off, some basic requirements. You’ll need:

    • Apache/Linux Hosting. Microsoft’s IIS has a completely different method for handling this sort of thing.
    • FTP access.
    • Apache mod_rewrite enabled. Depending on the type of hosting you have, it may be difficult to determine if you have this module installed and it may be impossible to enable if you don’t. If the steps below simply don’t seem to work, there is a good chance you don’t have mod_rewrite installed. Ask your tech support.
    • Mobile site in a subdirectory, eg. www.yourdomain.com/m/. This set of rules I’ve posted will not work with a mobile subdomain.

    The Steps

    1. Download mobilerules2.1.txt.
    2. Open the file in your favorite text editor, replace the 2 instances of “mobiledirectoryhere” (without quotes) with the directory name you are using for your mobile site. Save it.
    3. Open FTP client, enable ‘view hidden files’ – files beginning with a dot are hidden on linux. This option is typically buried in a “view” menu or something to that effect. Results may vary.
    4. Navigate to your site’s webroot (probably ‘htdocs’ or ‘www’).
      • If there is already a .htaccess file present in the directory. Download it, open it in your favorite text editor. Copy & paste the contents ofmobilerules2.1.txt into the file. Save it, upload it.
      • If there is no .htaccess file present. Upload mobilerules2.1.txt as is, rename it to .htaccess.
    6. Your Done. Test it from a mobile device.

    If you have any questions please leave a comment.

    Note: This script treats all opera mini, iphone and android the same as other phones and browsers. Leave some comments if you’d like me to address this.

  • Sorry Google

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    The other day I was doing some surfing as googlebot (using firefox’s user agent switcher plugin) to try to debug some weirdly cloaked spammy search results I was seeing. I had accidentally done 3 searches as googlebot when I was redirected to sorry.google.com with this error screen:

    Odd.

  • DIGG: 4000% PERFORMANCE INCREASE BY SORTING IN PHP RATHER THAN MYSQL

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    To scale at Digg they followed a set of practices very similar to those used at eBay. No joins, no foreign key constraints (to scale writes), primary key look-ups only, limited range queries, and joins were done in memory. When implementing the comment feature a 4,000 percent increase in performance was created by sorting in PHP instead of MySQL. All this effort required to make a relational database scale basically meant you were using a non-relational database anyway. So why not just use a non-relational database from the start?

    [via High Scalability]