Automatically Freecaching Your Entire Site On Demand

freecache.org provides a service whereby they will act as an intermediary for your website; instead of giving out http://yoursite.com/ you give people http://freecache.org/http://yoursite.com/. freecache then hits your site once, caches the contents and then serves them up thereby alievitating your site from having to service every hit.

this is a cool idea, no doubt. however, content that takes the most bandwidth, binary files like images, flash, movies, archives, downloadable executables, etc. must each be individually referred to by the freecache URL instead of your own... freecache won't cache everything, it will only cache what you ask it to. so does this mean you have to make a seperate copy of your site/page everytime you want to utilize freecache? fuck no. check out this secksy little trick:


<?php
    $freecached = "http://freecache.org/http://" . @$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
    if (substr(@$_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"], 0, strlen($freecached)) == $freecached) {
        echo "<base href=\"$freecached\" />\n";
    }
?>


this little snippet detects if the page is being accessed via freecache and if so outputs a BASE tag. if you're not familiar, a BASE tag instructs web browsers how to resolve all non-absolute paths. this forces browsers to automatically load all resources for the page via freecache, thus, you can automatically have freecache cache your entire site with no extra work whatsoever. also, you're not being a total asshole by just hardcoding http://freecache.org/http://yoursite/ everywhere, so you aren't wasting their bandwidth unecessarily. however, if you do give out a freecache url for your site, your site will automatically adjust.

caveats:

• absolute paths will not work. /images/img.jpg, given http://freecache.org/http://yoursite.com/ as a base, will convert to http://freecache.org/images/img.jpg. you must use images/img.jpg or ../path/to/images/img.jpg

enjoy!