The 2 best things since sliced bread

Not going to talk a lot here, but I wanted to share 2 quick things. If you are not using Cloudflare…..use it. It’s a CDN, but also so much more. It can protect your site from attacks and has a handy firewall, also a handy interface to handle your DNS, some nifty analytics, and can also handle your SSL cert to make it dead simple to go https. One of my favorite things is the speed optimizations where it can automatically minify your CSS and JS as well as do some very cool image optimization. Best of all it’s free for small companies and cheap for large….I use it on all my work sites and when I get some time I’m switching this site to it. They’ve also just implemented a new geocentric load balancer that I’m excited to try.
The other things I wanted to mention was this site HTACCESS Tester. If you’ve ever had to deal with an htaccess file, and who hasn’t if you’re doing serious web dev for SEO, you know it’s a pain in the ass….it can do remarkable things w/url rewrites and 301’s, BUT it can be incredibly evil as well. You probably already know about the tag you can insert into your virtual host configuration to turn on logging for htaccess (LogLevel alert rewrite:trace6), but that log is waaaay too much info, especially with a large .htaccess file. Enter htaccess tester. Now you can write a rule and check if it gets applied the way you think it will…seriously, it’s a life saver.