Password protecting a website

Password protecting a website using .htaccess - this method pretty much requires shell access, but most web hosts have a web control panel interface to do this work. It should be noted that this isn't the most fool-proof method of protecting your data, and a configuration error can inadvertently open up your directory to the world.

An example for ICDSoft:

The option for this is called "Protect" on the Control Panel.



You can browse to a directory through this interface, and click "Protect It!" next to a specific directory.


From this interface, you can add users for the directory:

Indispensable and portable free stuff

I was listening listening to one of the old Geek Brief podcasts, and was reminded of a website with portable versions of applications that are very useful when supporting computers that aren't your own, or running from several different PCs.

Of particular note are the Development apps available.

Notepad++ is an excellent text editor based on the SciTE editor that comes with Ruby installations. It's not quite my old standby gvim, but then again, it doesn't need much customization to do its thing either.

Also included in the section is XAMPP, which includes Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl. In addition, the FULL version package includes valuable extras like phpMyAdmin. I haven't experimented with either the lite or full package, but I will be reloading a PC soon, so I'll see then how much more smoothly this package makes setup for me.

SmartFTP is no longer free

Considering my web hosts do not provide shell access, a solid FTP client was invaluable for me in making updates and changing websites, since windows "web-based" ftp client is less useful than their console client for me (web-based does not work consistently with directories above user home).

I thought I had found a solid FTP client in SmartFTP. Kent J. Chen's weblog burst my bubble. However, he did offer up an alternative product, FileZilla. Downloading it now.

.htaccess redirect guide

My favorite tip:

Changed file extension?

This example is perfect if you've decided to switch to .php from .html pages. It will look for any .html page and redirect it to .php (ie http://www.example.com/yourpage.html and redirect it to http://www.example.com/yourpage.php). Now, be careful with this, it does mean any html page. I did this on one of my sites and had totally forgotten I had an iframe with .html content on some pages... I didn't notice for weeks that it was broken :S.
So learn from my mistake ;-) check, double check, then check again.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.com$1.php

Link to Random Image Password Generation

Captchas.net