IT and technology-related issues are frequently reported in the media. A well-known website is hacked, a new technology is unveiled, user feedback is discussed… Many times articles contain factual inaccuracies. The problem is that reporters are not “techies” and often provide misleading or erroneous analyses.
Posts Tagged ‘PHP’
Propagation of Misconceptions About IT in the Media
Posted March 9th, 2010 by Barnaby Knowles in Security, Website Development
Comparing mysql and mysqli
Posted February 24th, 2010 by Barnaby Knowles in Website Development
PHP offers you more than one way to connect and interact with your MySQL database. Two common ways to interact with MySQL through your PHP script are the mysql and the mysqli extensions. Both accomplish similar things but there are distinct and notable differences between the two.
Redirecting to Search Engine Friendly URLs
Posted February 9th, 2010 by Barnaby Knowles in Search Engine Optimisation, Website Development
Static URLs are preferable to dynamic URLs that contain variables such as the page ID where search engines are concerned. It’s worth investing the time and/or money in setting up URL rewriting on your website so that www.example.com/index.php?pageID=1 can now be viewed at www.example.com/page-1.htm or even better at www.example.com/page-name.htm. The latter two URLs appear to be static HTML pages but using Apache’s mod_rewrite module and an .htaccess file you can serve the same content as the first URL. The next step is to ensure that anyone accessing the original URL is redirected to the correct new URL with a 301 HTTP status code.
The Future of PHP : A Brief Look at PHP 6
Posted December 21st, 2009 by Barnaby Knowles in Website Development
PHP, or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is one of the most widely used scripting languages. Although originally designed for website development, PHP has evolved massively and can now also be run from the command line interface and can be used in standalone graphical applications.
The current major version is PHP 5.3, released in June 2009. The next milestone in the evolution of PHP is PHP 6, which has been in development for a number of years. PHP 6 will introduce new features, improve existing ones, and remove others.
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Special Characters in HTML with PHP’s htmlspecialchars() Function
Posted December 8th, 2009 by Barnaby Knowles in Content Management, Website Development
Introduction
Certain characters should not be used as plain text in HTML markup but should instead be represented by their respective HTML entities in order to preserve their meanings. When writing HTML this is a straightforward process – you type the HTML entity rather than the special character. But what happens when you have some plain text containing these characters (out of a database, for example) that you need to display? PHP has a function that will take a string and convert special characters to their HTML entities for you.
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Website Redirects on LAMP Hosting
Posted November 26th, 2009 by Barnaby Knowles in Website Development
You might want to redirect web pages or even your entire website for one reason or another. Perhaps you changed the name or location of a web page, you changed from HTML to PHP file extensions, you changed your domain name… the list goes on. Luckily there are many different ways in which you can set up redirects in a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web hosting environment.
