Anyone who develops using Firefox will probably already have the Web developer toolbar and the YSlow plugin. YSlow does a great job at assessing the performance of pages on your site and gives you a grade (A-F) of how err, performant (yeah I know) the page is. It breaks down the overall performance into different sections and grades you on each, pointing out where improvements can be made.

I usually get good grades for most of the sections with the exception of these ones:

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Add Expires headers
• Compress components with gzip
• Configure entity tags (ETags)
• Use cookie-free domains

First off, some of these I don't want to do anything about for the time being. I have no intention of using a Content Delivery Network (This is a great article for anyone interested in setting up Amazon S3) and I'm not planning on using a cookie-free domain, but the others I can address quite easily.

So after a bit of hunting around, progging and poking I present to you an extract of my .htaccess file, which adds expires headers, compresses the compressable and configures entity tags (well, turns them off).

If you host your sites on an IIS server, I'm afraid this will be of litte use to you. Sorry.

<ifmodule mod_headers.c>



# Turn off ETags

Header unset ETag

FileETag None

	

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault A0

	

# turn off last modified for these things.	

<FilesMatch "\\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css)$">

Header unset Last-Modified

</FilesMatch>

		

# Set these things to cache for 1 year

<FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|mp3|wav)$">

ExpiresDefault A29030400

Header append Cache-Control "public"

</FilesMatch>

 

# Set these things to cache for 1 week

<FilesMatch "\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf|js|css)$">

ExpiresDefault A604800

Header append Cache-Control "public"

</FilesMatch>

		

# Set these things to cache for 2 hours

<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt|html)$">

ExpiresDefault A7200

Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"

</FilesMatch>

    

# No caching for dynamic stuff please

<FilesMatch "\.(php)$">

ExpiresActive Off

Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"

Header set Pragma "no-cache"

</FilesMatch>

		

# try to catch any stragglers

ExpiresByType image/* "access plus 1 month"

</ifmodule>

</ifmodule>

There you go.

I'm working on one or two bits and pieces at the moment which I'll tell you more about soon.

So because its the new year and because the Krypton Factor is back on TV (minus the flight sim! - what were they thinking?) heres how I did it for anyone that might be trying.

Firstly you will need to get and install all the required bits and bobs namely apache 2 and php 5, so fire up a shell and do the following:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully all will have gone swimmingly and you can test your install by going to http://127.0.0.1 in your favorite web browser

The first issue I came across with this install was that apache couldn’t work out its hostname properly so was having a guess at it. Although this works fine locally anything trying to access your web server from elsewhere might have a bit of trouble finding it. Fortunately this is easy enough to fix. Again in the shell find out your hostname by issuing the fhostname command:

hostname

copy the result of the command so we can add it to the apache configuration file…

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

and add a server name command followed by the host name you copied earlier e.g.

ServerName my-host-name

Non vi lovers might like to know you need to press ‘i’ before you can add anything to the file and you need to press esc then type ‘:wq’ followed by return to write the file and quit.

Restart apache with ‘sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart’ and away you go.

The next issue I encountered was a missing log file directory after reboot which was stopping the httpd service from starting automatically. Simply add the directory and set the permissions to fix this one:

sudo mkdir /var/log/apache2/
sudo chmod 751 /var/log/apache2/

Bingo! all done. Don’t say I never give you nowt.

Basically its small and cheap enough to chuck it in my Jack Bauer man bag with all my other band gubbins and its clever enough to be able to borrow all the unsecured wifi juice I can find (not that I condone that kind of thing).

After around 30 seconds It was apparent that the fun skool 3 esque Xandros distro wasn't going to give me everything that I wanted, although I'm sure it will be perfect for kids and anyone who just wants a portable internet hot pipe.

I read up quite a lot on this first and found this to be the most complete and accurate tutorial:

http://trenteee.blogspot.com/2007/12/howto-install-ubuntu-on-eee-pc-with_10.html

It took me about an hour an now I have a lovely little ubuntu box. Some people have had bother with the madwifi drivers I found the forums at eeepcuser quite useful even if they are a bit out of date sometimes.

Rock on.