Thanks in part to a nudge from , and in part to a smart little  (long since  by its author) [see below], the documents on this site are now served gzip compressed (at sizes reduced as much as 75%) to browsers which can handle such data, which I believe is most, though I’m not sure, but I’m fairly sure that browsers which cannot handle such data are sent a plain uncompressed file. I would ask for reports of decompression errors, but if there were any decompression errors the request wouldn’t be visible; such is the nature of compression. If you can read this it works.
UPDATE: Anyone with a recent version of PHP (4.1+) running on their server can easily take advantage of this. Benefits are greatly reduced bandwidth consumption and a much speedier site, especially for readers using modems.
Simply place the following snippet at the very first line of PHP-aware web pages, before <html>:
<?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>
And that’s it. Test .
Potential problems and solutions:
.htaccess (if one exists already, open it) and paste the following inside it: AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .htm
"output handler 'ob_gzhandler' cannot be used twice", your pages are already being compressed. Felicitations. "headers already sent", make sure the snippet is at the very beginning of the page, before anything else.* * *