Building the Web » Web development

Error 400: Size of a request header field exceeds server limit

Andrei Filonov — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:33:33 +0000

If you get error like this one

Error 400 Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

That means that your browser is trying to send too much at once. Probably, it’s size of the cookies. The easy way to fix it – delete cookies. Of course, you lose all info in the cookies, but at least you can access site again.

If you develop/manage web site and your customers complain of this error message – there are two things to do:

Review cookies and limit the size of cookies your application stores in the browser.
Increase allowed request size in web server configuration

To increase request size in Apache, add directive LimitRequestFieldSize to the configuration file. Default value is 8190 bytes. To increase it 2 times add
LimitRequestFieldSize 16380
Apache restart is required.

Typos and traffic

Andrei Filonov — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:21:22 +0000

I just discovered interesting thing – to my shame I misspelled word “developer” (as in web developer) on my web site and for a while I was advertising myself as “web developmer“. Bad for me I guess. But interesting thing, when checking statistics, I get better position in the search results as a developMer – just because there is not a lot of pages with same typo. Just to compare – when I search for the web developer it returns over 56 millions of pages and for web developmer it’s only 4500. So, I guess if I add more words like this to my page saying that I do dtabase desing and php programing as well as software analitics, I have good chance to pop up higher in Google search results. The question is, however, do I really want people to see pages with those typos and if those people will be willing to hire guy with spelling like that and no attention to details. Well, I guess some people won’t notice, but probably I don’t really want to take a chance – so fixing the spelling and having a good laugh. At least I still have a blog entry with developmer in it!

Windows Application in PHP???

Andrei Filonov — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:46:51 +0000

Quite an interesting idea – to execute PHP scripts in Windows as regular exe. Behind the scenes it uses IE component, but there is no IE toolbars and you have a control on windows your application uses. Also you can create an installer, so it will look for user as a regular windows application.

These days a lot of applications are actually switching to web services, so you actually do not have to install software, you can just use it from your internet browser. But I can still see quite a few uses of this tool to create client site components for the application.

So, will keep this in mind and may be one day will use it not just to play.

Here is the link

Freelance PHP positions

Andrei Filonov — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:28:41 +0000

Do you know PHP and thinking about getting some freelance job? You are not alone for sure, freelancing is a good way to get an extra income, to get started building your portfolio or to stop coming to the office and work from home.

Here is a good list of freelance positions for PHP developers:
http://workfromhomephpjobs.blogspot.com/