My most used htaccess settings

The file .htaccess allows us to change some of the settings of a server for a particular directory and it's subdirectories. While it is preferable to make this type of configurations in the server configuration file itself by the use of a <Directory> section, sometimes we simply don't have access to this configuration file, specially when we have a shared hosting account. Most shared hosting providers allows us to make changes to the behavior of the server only in this way.

Working with UTF-8 in PHP, MySQL and Apache

As I have previously posted in this website, I believe it is a good idea to standardize in one character encoding across all parts of a system, and as my preferred character encoding is UTF-8, when I create a PHP system I check the following things:

• That the browser receives and interprets the output of my PHP scripts as UTF-8.
• That the (X)HTML forms accept UTF-8.
• That PHP treats the data received from a MySQL database as UTF-8.