This article describes a search engine optimization technique known as cloaking. While there are some legitimate uses for this technique, search engines consider cloaking to be an unethical practice, because the technique can be used to artificially boost a site's rankings in search engines. The use of cloaking, or a technique that is mistaken for cloaking, will likely get a … [Read more...]
Lots of Deprecated Features in PHP 5.3 Will Break Web Sites
Many older sites written in PHP as well as many newer sites that evolved from older legacy code will find their sites broken when their servers are upgraded to PHP 5.3. That's because many older PHP functions and INI directives are now formally deprecated (made obsolete) in version 5.3. This will not just affect ancient web sites written with very old versions of PHP. Many … [Read more...]
Beware of Domain Name Misrepresentations
I just noticed a domain name auction where the seller was claiming that the .mn domain extension is a Minnesota domain. You may have also seen people selling .ws domains as a domain meaning "web site" or a domain ending in .tv for "television station" or .md as meaning "medical doctor." What do all of these have in common? If they are being sold with that type of claim, they … [Read more...]
10 Ways to Speed Up a Website
The first impression that a user gets when visiting a website is the speed at which the page downloads and renders. How many times have you hit the back button and abandoned a web site because it was loading slowly? We offer some methods to prevent this from happening with your web site. There are five components for faster web site performance: a. Server performance - … [Read more...]
Google Introduces Page Speed Tool to Improve Site Performance
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. … [Read more...]
Editing Files Online with FileZilla
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. First, we do not really recommend editing files on a live web site. In my humble opinion, you should always download files to your PC or a local server and work on them there. If you are … [Read more...]
Using PHP to Display Directory Contents With a Select List
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. … [Read more...]
A PHP Date Select Box Routine With Date Validation
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. If you know basic PHP, this … [Read more...]
Using the robots.txt File
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. The file must be placed in a web site's root directory … [Read more...]
Using the MySQL LIMIT Clause for Paging with PHP
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. The LIMIT clause allows you to select a numeric range of results from a recordset that … [Read more...]