Tips, tricks & tools

If you’ve recently updated your WordPress site, you might have noticed that there’s a trailing slash missing from your page urls. Pages are now domain.com/page instead of domain.com/page/. The folks at WordPress don’t seem to think this is a very big deal, but for anyone with even the slightest interest in SEO and duplicate content – then you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to fix it (at least I was). I messed around with the WordPress link-template.php file, and fixed the problem, but also created a new one while I was at it. Just as I was about to give in and learn to live without my beloved trailing slash, I found a simple plugin from Peter Claus Lamprecht that totally fixes the problem. Unless you can read German, you’ll never find the plugin on his site – but if you click here, then it’s all yours. Thanks Peter!

Do you use xml sitemaps on your website? Google, Yahoo, and MSN now all support sitemap autodiscovery via robots.txt. All you need to do is add one line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml


I recently tried to park a domain name on a cPanel addon domain – which seemed like a good idea until I found out that not only was it impossible, but it also left a rogue ‘hidden’ DNS entry somewhere in my reseller account. I eventually worked out how to do it using htaccess.

This method will 301 your empty “parked” domain, to another addon domain – so parked.com/whatever will 301 to www.domain.com/whatever.

• Create a normal addon domain using cPanel e.g domain.com, and upload your content
• Add the domain you want to park as an additional addon domain e.g parked.com
• Drop the following htaccess file in the ‘parked’ domain directory

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parked.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.parked.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

InFormEnter is a great little plugin for Firefox that adds a drop down list of ‘pre-filled’ fields to help you fill in forms more quickly. It saves heaps of time when manually adding your site to directories, and it’s so intuitive to use that you can zone out completely and work zombie style.

Another nice little PHP tool is PHPFormatter, where you can paste in your messy PHP and it will format it to several preset styles (including PEAR). This is really a great tool for those of us that write really messy code, and then can’t work it out a few days later.

Daniel Vine, creator of the excellent iCapture Safari preview tool has added an IE7 version called ieCapture – so now you can preview your sites in Internet Explorer 7 without having to install IE7.