Index syndication
comment syndication

Coral Content Distributed network

Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview
For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.


RewriteEngine On
#prevent slashdot effect
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogspot\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} reddit\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} news\.slashdot\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} slashdot\.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
#Rewrite images to allow CDN to serve them
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*\.(gif|png|jpe?g))$ https://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1/$2 [R,L]
#Wordpress rewites
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]


mod_rewrite is your friend.

Open Source software Promotion

Some friends and I were discussing the benefits of using Open Source software which is low cost or free (as in beer) versus the equivalent Commercial and close source products. Examples of comparison were

  • Photoshop vs. Gimp
  • Apache HTTPD vs. IIS
  • Windows vs. Open Solaris/OpenBSD/Linux etc.

It seems like we are not the only ones thinking about this topic. Slashdot today posted that CNET has a feature promoting Open Source application alternatives for the average home user, if only to reduce software costs to the end user. It does not include Operating Systems in comparison, so this article appears to be aimed at Windows users.

Read the list of ten Open Source applications CNET believe you need.