POLICE acting on a tip-off from the public arrested a 41-year-old prison escapee in Cairns last night.
Archive for May, 2011
CAIRNS urgently needs at least a dozen extra paramedics to cope with the increasing workload amid calls for an investigation into staffing issues.
POLICE are looking for three youths seen fleeing a burning building in Lyons St yesterday morning.
A BITTER feud between Paul Freebody and federal MP Warren Entsch is threatening to derail the Liberal National Party’s bid to win the state seat of Cairns.
WIND farm protesters in the Walkamin area are watching closely to see how Tablelands Regional Council reacts to conflicting noise reports from another wind farm proposal near Ravenshoe.
THE Far North’s class of 2010 scored higher OPs, secured more tertiary education offers and completed more school-based traineeships than graduates in previous years.
ORGANISERS of the Cairns Airport Challenge need another 200 helpers for the event.
THREE nurses will be in a race for life when they compete in the Cairns Half triathlon.
Before editing your .htaccess file, always make a backup so you can restore it if needed.
Remove www in url
For SEO reasons, you might always remove (or use) the www prefix in your urls. The following snippet will remove the www from your website url and redirect any url with the www to the non-www version.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^your-site.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://your-site.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Source: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/www-no-www/
Prevent hotlinking
Hotlinking is a bad practice that consist of using the images from another site on yours. When you’re hotlinked by someone else, your bandwidth is used for someone else profit. Of course, you may want to prevent hotlinkers. Just add the following snippet to your .htaccess file after replacing the example urls by your own urls.
RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]
Redirect all WordPress feeds to feedburner
Most bloggers are using Feedburner, a web service that lets you know how many people are reading your blog via feeds. If you’re using WordPress, you should redirect all WordPress feeds (rss, atom, etc) to your feedburner feed. Modify lines 2 and 3, and then paste this code to your .htaccess file.
<IfModule mod_alias.c> RedirectMatch 301 /feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/ RedirectMatch 301 /comments/feed/(atom|rdf|rss|rss2)/?$ http://feedburner.com/yourfeed/ </IfModule>
Source: http://www.wprecipes.com/how-to-redirect-wordpress-rss-feeds-to-feedburner-with-htaccess
Create custom error pages
Tired of the old errors pages of your site? Just create some html files with the look you want, upload them to your server, and add the following to your .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badrequest.html ErrorDocument 401 /errors/authreqd.html ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.html ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html ErrorDocument 500 /errors/serverr.html
Source: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/custom-error-pages/
Force download of specific files
When offering some files such as mp3s, eps or xls, for download on your site, you may force download instead of letting the browser decide what to do.
This snippet will force the download of .xls and .eps files from your server.
<Files *.xls> ForceType application/octet-stream Header set Content-Disposition attachment </Files> <Files *.eps> ForceType application/octet-stream Header set Content-Disposition attachment </Files>
Source: http://www.givegoodweb.com/post/30/forcing-a-download-with-apache-and-htaccess
Log PHP errors
This snippet is an interesting way to log errors from your php file into a log file. Just create a php_error.log file somewhere on your server, and add the snippet to your .htaccess file. Don’t forget to modify the log file location on line 7.
# display no errs to user php_flag display_startup_errors off php_flag display_errors off php_flag html_errors off # log to file php_flag log_errors on php_value error_log /location/to/php_error.log
Source: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/php-error-logging/
Remove file extensions from urls
File extensions may be useful to developers, but there’s absolutely no need for your site visitors to be able to see them. This snippet will remove the .html extension on any html files. Of course, this code can be easily adapted to remove extensions from other file extensions such as php.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
# Replace html with your file extension, eg: php, htm, asp
Source: http://eisabainyo.net/weblog/2007/08/19/removing-file-extension-via-htaccess
Prevent directory listing
On your web server, when a directory do not have an index file, Apache automatically create a list of all files from the current directory. If you do not wish that anyone can see which files are on your server, just add the following code to your .htaccess file to prevent automatic directory listing.
Options -Indexes
Reduce pages weight by compressing static data
Do you know that it is possible to send compressed data to the visitors, which will be decompressed by the client? This code will definitely save you (and your visitor) bandwidth and reduce your pages weight.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Automatically add utf-8 charset to files
In order to avoid encoding problems, you can force a specific encoding directly on your .htaccess file. That way, you’ll ensure that your html documents will always render correctly, even if your forget to add a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"> directive on your html pages.
<FilesMatch "\.(htm|html|css|js)$"> AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 </FilesMatch>
Source: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/setting-charset-in-htaccess.html
If you ask some, they’ll tell you Web 2.0 as we know it is probably on its way out the door. For many, Web 2.0 is characterized mainly by the ability of users to share information quickly with others, which has been developed into the phenomenon that we call social media. From Twitter to Facebook to YouTube and to all sorts of other kinds of communities, Web 2.0 is all about sharing and seeing. Now if you recall or were around during what is now known as Web 1.0, information was put up on a website and that was it–the best way of sharing it was privately through e-mails and such. There was little to no communication and if you wanted information, you had to go to the source for it. Can you imagine such a harsh internet? Now with Web 2.0 on it’s way out, the obvious question is, what in the world is Web 3.0 going to be?
What is Web 3.0?
If you’re anything like me, it’s hard to imagine how the internet is going to top sites like Twitter and Facebook. But it’s bound to happen and when you research Web 3.0, you find out it is going to be synonymous with the user’s interaction with the web. In Web 2.0 we focused on the users’ interaction with others, now we are going to focus more on the users themselves, which is always a plus. But how is this going to happen?
Web 3.0 is being referred to by experts as the semantic web; semantic meaning data driven. The data will come from the user and the web will essentially adjust to meet the needs of the user. For example, if you do a lot of searching for ‘design blogs’, you’ll receive more advertisements related to design. Also, when you search for other things, for example, ‘computers’, the web will keep in mind that you often search for design and may pull up search queries that combine ‘design’ and ‘computers’.
Benefits of Web 3.0?
A huge benefit of Web 3.0 is the move towards being able to access data from anywhere. This is mainly being driven by the heavy usage of smart phones and cloud applications. The idea here is to make sure that the user can access as much data as possible from anywhere, not just their home. Technology is trying to expand this idea in ways that allow TV’s to pick up on user data, and allowing smart phones to access data on your computer. For designers like myself who typically forget their jump drives, this is an amazing and useful advancement!
Web 3.0′s Effect on Design
So now that you have an idea of what Web 3.0 is and what it’s going to be, we have to ask the most important question for us: what does that mean for design? Web 2.0 design was based around drawing attention and persuading your audience, because after all, web 2.0 made a huge deal about being able to purchase things online. Web 2.0 wanted to generate excitement and get people to make a purchase and understand what they were doing. You want to make a purchase? Sure, then click this button. You want to join the mailing list? Great, then there’s no question about clicking this button. That is the basis of Web 2.0 design.
Other elements were added to make things more fun and give a bit of style. The usage of linear gradients in web 2.0 is almost necessary. Whatever color combination you desire, linear gradients are typically present from your background to your buttons. Other trends surfaced like various badges, rounded corners and a necessary usage of icons. But again the question remains, what can we expect for web 3.0?
Web 2.0 Design vs. Web 3.0 Design
In web 2.0 we had to create design that was great for the web. I think in web 3.0, we will firstly have to create design that is going to be good not just for the web and the web browser, but for all sorts of media. With the growth in the usage of smart phones and tablets, people want more usage out of their items and to be able to access more things as best as possible. Design will have to be able to translate in great quality across all sorts of technologies. Now while you can create two different websites (one for the web and one for mobile devices), designers and developers will have to kill two birds with one stone, by creating one website that will look good in both environments.
Also for Web 3.0, designers will continue to focus on making things simpler. The truth is, the designer has the absolute power to persuade viewers on where to look first and second and so forth and so on. By doing this the designer creates a hierarchy of importance, that should not be muddled by useless design. Designers will continue to design so that content remains king by putting much focus on it and taking focus off non-content things such as logos and navigation bars.
Web 3.0 Design Trends?
Using these types of techniques plays into the increasing popularity of the minimalist design technique, where the focus is not necessarily making something as simple as possible, but making it as simplistic as possible. Creating a site with non-flashy web elements makes the user HAVE to focus on the content of the site. Of course designers desire to design and will ‘fancify’ some things, but in Web 3.0, that isn’t the main focus. The focus is to draw the viewers’ eye to the content or other important information on the page.
Many of the design trends used in Web 2.0 will only change by way of design, but not really the usage. The change in Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 is about how the internet is used, not really how it’s seen (with the exception of mobile devices and such). I believe designs will continue to get more and more minimalistic while maintaining a certain sense of beauty, but of course we will continue to use buttons and rounded corners and gradients. The design of Web 3.0 will be based on the way designers decide to design it and what becomes popular.
More on Web 3.0
Perhaps you desire to do your own research on the budding Web 3.0. Well we have provided some slide shows and videos that will get you started on the right path. Web 3.0 isn’t here just yet, but when it does come, you should know what’s coming at you!
The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0
Evolution Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0