Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: dreamhost

  • Kick PageSpeed Up A Notch

    If you’re using Apache and PHP 5.3 on your DreamHost domain, you have the magical power to enable Google PageSpeed. Just go and edit your domain and make sure you check the box for “Page Speed Optimization”:

    PageSpeed Option

    But what does that even mean, I hear you ask?

    partnersPageSpeed is Google’s way to speed up the web (yeah, that was redundant), and it serves as a way for your server to do the work of caching and compressing, taking the load off your webapps. Like WordPress. Anyone can install this on their apache server, and it’s free from Google Developers: PageSpeed Mod. Since you’re on DreamHost, you lucky ducky you, we did it for you. Now you can sit back and relax.

    The first thing to notice when you turn on PageSpeed is that it minifies your webpage. That means it takes your pretty formatted source code and gets rid of the extra spaces you don’t use. This is called by using the PageSpeed filter “collapse_whitespace.” Another filter we use is “insert_ga” which is how we’re magically able to insert your Google Analytics for you from your panel. That filter automatically inserts your GA code on every page on your domain. That’s right! No more plugins!

    If you’re like me, you may start to wonder what other filters you should use, and that entirely depend on what you want to remove. I knew I wanted to remove code comments like the following:

    <!-- #site-navigation -->

    That’s easy! There’s a filter for “remove_comments” so I can just use that. They have a whole mess of filters listed in the Filter Documentation and reading through it took a while. If you read each one, at the bottom they talk about how risky a certain filter is. Taking that into account, I went ahead and added some low and some high risk filters, since I know what I’m using.

    The magic sauce to add all this is just to edit your .htaccess and put in the following near the top:

    <IfModule pagespeed_module>
    ModPagespeed on
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_comments,rewrite_javascript,rewrite_css,rewrite_images
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters elide_attributes,defer_javascript,move_css_to_head
    ModPagespeedJpegRecompressionQuality -1
</IfModule>

    Really, that’s it.

    The ones I picked are:

    • remove_comments – Remove HTML comments (low risk)
    • rewrite_javascript – minifies JS (med. to high risk, depending on your site)
    • rewrite_css – parses linked and inline CSS, rewrites the images found and minifies the CSS (med. risk)
    • rewrite_images – compresses and optomizes images (med. risk)
    • elide_attributes – removing attributes from tags (med. risk)
    • defer_javascript – combines JS and puts it at the end of your file (high risk AND experimental!)
    • move_css_to_head – combines CSS and moves it to the head of your file (low risk)

    Now keep in mind, not all of the features will work. While DreamHost is on a pretty cutting edge version of PageSpeed, they’re constantly innovating over there and improving. The best thing about these changes is, if you do it right, you can speed your site up faster than any plugin could do for you. And that? Is pretty cool right there.

  • Domain Registration, No Hosting

    Just want to use DreamHost for DNS? You can do that!

    Login into your Panel and go into Domain > Registrations.

    Click the “Add Hosting” button on the far right.

    It will redirect you to a new page and from that page you can select from “Fully Hosted, Redirect, etc”. The very last one is “DNS Only”.

    Go ahead and select that and there you go!

    You can also go to the Manage Domains page and click on (Add New Domain / Sub-Domain button), and scroll to the bottom of the next page to set it up for DNS Only.

  • Contact Form 7 and Anti-Spam

    DreamHost has a fairly simple anti-spam policy, which can be summed up as this: You cannot send email from an address that isn’t your domain.

    If that was greek to you, don’t worry. What that means is that my WordPress blog here can only send emails as elftest.net. That poses a small problem if you’re not using your domain-name to send email (a rare occurrence in WordPress), and a large one if you happen to be using the popular Contact Form 7 plugin.

    Contact Form 7 lets you create robust contact forms for your site, however it has one minor ‘flaw’ (and I hesitate to use that word). When it sends email, it sends it from the user who submits the form. DreamHost, naturally, doesn’t like this. joe@gmail.com isn’t an elftest user!

    Thankfully there’s a work-around for you, and it’s really easy. For most people, the plugin SMTP Configure, once installed and activated, will automatically fix this for you! It’s written by a reliable and trusted programmer, and I highly recommend it. Remember! Once you install the plugin, just activate it. For the vast majority of people, this was it. Everything magically worked.

    Then there were some people who came and said “No, this does not work.” I’ve yet to reproduce it, but one person told me that after putting in his SMTP credentials, just like you would setting up email clients, it worked perfectly.

    Additional: If you’re using Jetpack’s contact form, and you’ve changed the ‘to’ email address, you will also need this plugin. You’ll know you’re using that option because you’ll see this in your contact form shortcode:

    to="me@myotherdomain.com"