The simplest way to set-up a “we’ll be back shortly” page

If you’re going to have to stop your site for a maintenance or deploy break and care about your users (and SEO!), you should setup a custom 503 page. AskApache provides some documentation on this, but the examples require creating a PHP page. One of the commenters proposed a non-PHP version, but it’s complicated and didn’t work for me.

So, this is the simplest way to set-up a custom “we’ll be back shortly” error page in Apache 2 that also tells Googlebots to retry after 1 hour:

ErrorDocument 503 /503.html
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/503.html$
Header always set Retry-After "3600"
RewriteRule .* - [R=503]

Read on for explanation and a more advanced example.

Multilingual page caching in Ruby on Rails

There is plenty of stuff written about caching in Ruby on Rails. You can easily cache anything from objects returned by a query to fragments or even whole pages. Especially storing full pages (known as page caching) in a directory when Apache¹ can grab them is really efficient. And there are quite decent tutorials about it.

Sadly, most of the tutorials assume that you live in a small, cozy, speak-english-or-die type of world and your only contact with foreign languages is when you order “pommes frites” at MacDonald’s.² The rest of us, working on multilingual applications, might have a lot of problems with implementing page caching. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult. Read on to see for yourself.