useful htaccess tricks[/caption]For some reason, the .htaccess file is often overlooked by web designers. If you have no idea what the .htaccess file is, I’ll just give you the Wikipedia definition: “A .htaccess (hypertext access) file is a directory-level configuration file supported by several web servers, that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.”
But let’s get to it, here are some of the cool things you can do in your .htacces file.
1. Hotlinking protection with .htaccess
Websites that steal your written content can be quite annoying because they can hurt your Google rankings by creating duplicate content. However there is even worst: websites that steal your content AND don’t even make the effort of downloading images and reuploading it on their server. Loading images from your server is called hotlinking, and it’s a bad practice because it steals some of your precious bandwidth.
To preven people from hotlinking your images, just include the following lines in your htaccess file (obviously replace yoursite.com with your site’s URL.
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpg|swf|flv|png)$ /feed/ [R=302,L]
