Compressing CSS on the Fly

# A Week Expires header from askapache

Header set Cache-Control “max-age=604800, public”

# compress all files from :http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

#Etags From: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#fileetag
FileETag MTime Size

I love this one^^

To make it cacheable you can configure your apache to add an expires header or do it by sending the header using PHP as passerby said.

I decided not to use ob_start method because it actually made it slower for the browser to get it (~110ms compressing vs. ~75ms natural) what i did do was to generate one whole big CSS file from several files to reduce the number of requests made to the server.

If you still want to compress your CSS dynamically I found a better function at http://php.oregonstate.edu/manual/en/function.php-strip-whitespace.php (look in the comments).

$offset = 60 * 60 * 24 * 1;
header(“Expires: ” . gmdate(“D, d M Y H:i:s”, time() + $offset) . ” GMT”);

That would make the css file cached for about 2 days. You can adjust that as needed. Have a good day.

I may try my hand at making a script that will compress HTML also, but I’m still learning about how to use regex in PHP. It can get quite confusing at times.