Dreamweaver and GZIP files

Question

Hi,

I've recently tried to optimize my site for speed and brandwith. Amongst many other techniques, I've used GZIP on my .css and .js files.

Using PuTTY I compressed the files on my site and then used:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Konqueror
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
 RewriteRule ^(.*)\.css$ $1.css.gz [QSA,L]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)\.js$ $1.js.gz [QSA,L]
 <FilesMatch \.css\.gz$>
  ForceType text/css
 </FilesMatch>
 <FilesMatch \.js\.gz$>
  ForceType text/javascript
 </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
 AddEncoding gzip .gz
</IfModule>

in my .htaccess file so that they get served properly because all my links are without the ".gz".

My problem is, I cant work on the GZIP file in Dreamweaver. Is there a plugin or extension of somesort that allows Dreamweaver to temporarily uncompress thses files so it can read them?

Or is there a way that I can work on my local copies as regular files, and server side they automatically get compressed when they are uploaded.

Or is there a different code editor I should be using that would completely get around this?

Or a just a different technique to doing this?

I hope this question makes sense,

Thanks

Answer 1

Dreamweaver do not have the capability built in to natively work with zipped or gzipped files. After you pull down a file from your server, you would need to extract the file(s), make your edits, and then re-pack the file(s) to upload them. If you do not have an application locally to do this, I'd suggest: 7-Zip: http://7-zip.org/

A server side solution could also be used, but I guess that you'd have to have a caching mechanism on the sever that would first check if a newer version of a file exists, if it does then gzip it, if not move on to serving the file. Perhaps ask a new question specific to gzip files to serve using the server language of your choice, I'm sure there are a number of solutions out there.