Articles in 2014

As some of you might know, PHP scripts are compiled to bytecode right before they are executed. This process costs time and server resources. Also this is done all over again every single time your script gets executed, even if your script hasn't been changed in years. So what could be more obvious than caching the results of the compilation to reduce load on your server. Today I want to show you one way of achieving this, with a little help from the Alternative PHP Cache (APC).

Not all folders and files in your webfolder should be accessible to anyone. Configuration or debug informations should be kept secret. Also it can be pretty annoying if crawlers keep ignoring the rules from your robots.txt and just index and list all files they find. In this article I will explain to you how you can restrict access to files and folders.

Since 2011 Google provides an Apache module called Google PageSpeed. This module has some nice features, which can reduce the load time of your website significantly. In this article I want to show you how to install PageSpeed on Ubuntu, give you an example of a configuration and some tips, which may help you get going.

Drupal has somewhat limited options, when it comes to displaying information during site maintenance. By default admins may enter a simple maintenance message. Most of the times this is just enough, but sometimes you want to be able to make the maintenance page look more appealing. For this reason I developed a Maintenance Node module.

I can't help it. Every once in a while the RPG Creator pops up in my head and I need to work on it a little. Sooner or later I get distracted by something else, but most of the times I actually make a few steps towards completion. This time I revisited the battle script and turned it into a class.