Installing mod_pagespeed on CentOS (cPanel/WHM)
This month, Google announced the release of an Apache module to optimize rendering times called mod_pagespeed. They've long been on to the optimization wagon: last year, they released "Page Speed", a Firefox extension to help developers optimize their pages and embed most of mod_pagespeed's diagnostics in their Webmaster Tools platform. If you want to install mod_pagespeed on your CentOS server running cPanel and WHM, you might have a few problems since the mod_pagespeed RPM depends on the httpd 2.2 package and it usually isn't installed when running cPanel/WHM since those app want to be able to control versioning themselves and not through YUM, so we'll do it manually. This guide is intended for 32bit CentOS servers where you have superuser privileges on and run cPanel and WHM. If you're running a 64bit, simply adapt the various paths and files used throughout this article.
What you need to do is rather simple and safe. It does involve modifying the Apache configuration files though, so make backups of every file mentioned in this article if you feel the need to.
Firefox Quick Searches with Smart Keywords
One thing I've never understood about Firefox users is how they use Firefox's buit-in search box. It's a nice feature and it's extendable, I'll give you that, but I find there is something so much more powerful and convenient also built into Firefox that doesn't get the credit it deserves: Quick Searches (or Smart Keywords). It's not even mentioned on the Firefox Features page! The idea of quick searches is relatively simple. It's a bookmark with a keyword. You use that keyword to access the bookmark. You can add parameters to your keyword in such a way that Firefox will replace a given string in the bookmark's URL with your parameter, therefore making it a powerful GET URL shortcut.
With the recent addition of the Awesome Bar (or Smart Location Bar) since Firefox 3, the location bar has become the place where most power users will type their queries in. Why use another box to query specific search engines/sites? You can access the location bar effortlessly with F6 or with a mouse click, so why would you bother with a whole other bar for the same purposes as the main one?
