For years people have tried to figure out how Google manages to produce lightning fast search results from the huge amount of data that they have to work with. They are still not giving away all of their secrets, but they have a released a free tool and a set of web site develoment "best practices" to help web site owners improve the performance of their web sites.
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We have received several requests for information regarding how to edit live online files using FileZilla. You will need to configure FileZilla to edit live files. Here is how you do it.
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Sometimes there is a need to display the list of files in the directory and allow a user to select a file name from the list. We run into this most often when a user must be able to select an image or a document to be downloaded or displayed after being selected. Here is a very simple PHP script that will display the content of a web site directory using an HTML select list.
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Sometimes you need to use a drop-down select box routine to allow users to select a date that you can easily save in a MySQL database. Here is one way to generate date boxes using PHP. The code also includes a JavaScript date validation function that prevent users from selecting an invalid date. The function also handles leap year situations.
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The robots.txt file, also called the robots exclusion file, is used to provide useful information to search engine spiders. The file can serve a number of purposes, but it is primarily used to tell a spider which files and directories should NOT be indexed, and that is why it is also called the robots exclusion file.
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One of the first questions that comes up when someone starts using PHP and the very powerful MySQL database is: How do I page through the results of a query like I see with search results on many web sites? This is pretty easy to accomplish if you know how to use the MySQL LIMIT clause.
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I normally would not cover an issue this basic, but I receive requests almost every week for answers from aspiring (OK, call them newbie) web developers who cannot see the images on their web pages after using FileZilla or another FTP utility to transfer HTML and image files to their web site. Almost all say that all they see is the infamous red X where their images should display.
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There are times when you want the printed output from a web page to look different that the way the page is displayed on a computer screen. This is particularly useful with blogs and web sites that provide information that users may want to print and file away for later use or for late night reading. I am amazed at the number of major web sites whose pages cannot be printed properly because the content either doesn’t fit on the page, or is cluttered with ads and menus that have no useful purpose on a printed page. CSS can come to the rescue with an external style sheet designed to format printed output.
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CSS shortcuts combine cascading style sheets rules into one efficient line of code. If your web site uses large stylesheets, cutting down on the amount of CSS code can help your code to load and render faster.
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Many people mistakenly believe that Internet was developed in the 1990s. The history of the Internet actually goes much deeper than that. The Internet we use today has evolved over the past 40+ years from a simple communications network to one that spans the globe and includes participants in every country in the world. Many people are also surprised that the Internet started out as a Cold War military project.
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