Archive for February, 2008

Whenever you’re creating a website, choosing colors randomly often leads to disaster. Webdesign may not be as traditional as painting, but it is an art nonetheless and like all types of art, it requires a lot of careful study. There are several things that you have to consider before selecting final colors for your website.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an impending death of templating engines on our hands.

I won’t go as far as to speculate we’re beyond the death of templating engines, but the facts of the matter are this:

1. Templating engines seperate presentation from logic.
2. Today’s frameworks seperate presentation from logic.
3. Any good developer not using a framework either seperates presentation from logic anyway, or has a good reason for not doing so.

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Several businesspeople see the internet as a big promotional machine capable of successfully advertising and marketing about almost any product or service. One of the most important promotional techniques used via the internet is email marketing. This type of online marketing is a good way to generate interest in your products, give out information, as well as encourage return visitors to your site. Developing a successful email marketing strategy could be the key to increasing your sales.

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Traffic? Customers? What’s the difference?

A lot, actually. Erroneously, some people think that traffic = customers which is not always the case. Take for example, Site A. Site A has about a hundred visitor everyday, but no one is buying. So what makes you think that having two hundred or three hundred visitors will bring in the cash flow? In reality, even if you bring in a thousand visitors, if no one converts then there will be no sales.
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Much hype has surrounded the first ever human powered search engine. A search engine the creator claimed that could take on the search engine giant Google. However, it proved to be quite a letdown.

Search Wikia, a search engine developed by Wikia Inc., was launched in the alpha state last January 7. The uniqueness of the search engine stems from the fact that it is open source. Users are free to modify and adapt the software, search results, and other content compiled by the search engine. It allows users to vote upon individual results using 1 to 5 stars, and to flag results that the user finds inappropriate or irrelevant to the query, streamlining the search results even further. Also, it incorporates a social networking system alongside the search engine. It ties information about users and his friends along side search results.

Now let’s look at the itty gritty facts.

Looking at the “human powered” search engine, Search Wikia is quite a disappointment right now. A simple search such as “Arachnophobia” yielded only 212 results. You actually need to go down to 9 places before you get a result from a trustworthy site. The results from Search Wikia pales in comparison with Google’s 546,000 search results. With something more complex, Search Wikia fails to return any result at all. A search for “Oneirophrenia” returned zero results in Search Wikia, despite the fact that a website named www.oneirophrenia.com is available. Clearly, the search engine needs a lot of work right now.

Then there is the issue of the search engine being open source. Due to the transparency that they are offering, the ranking algorithms are visible to anyone who wishes to see it. The threat of spammers and hackers breaking the code and gaming the system is in the air. Not good if you are aiming to topple down Google in my opinion.

As for the social networking system, it’s just like every other social networking site out there. It asks for your profile, your interests and so on and so forth. Think of a really watered down social networking site crossed with a search engine, and you have Search Wikia.

All in all, it was an ambitious project. But the question remains, will it live up to the expectations that the hype created? Perhaps, but it’s certainly not today. Right now, when you need to search on something, Search Wikia would be at the bottom of your list. And you wouldn’t really use it right now for social networking. It needs a lot of work, especially in the indexing department, before anyone would even attempt to search something using it. They need to provide something new to the users before they adapt Search Wikia.

Here’s one for all the Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python (+Django) and ASP/.net web developers. There are a lot of myths about PHP, often developing from the language’s early beginnings, or simply by misconceptions perpetuated by areas of the enormous user base.

Sure, it isn’t perfect. It has its problems; from professionalism to consistency and even versioning. Still, it’s a fantastic language for web development; it’s efficient, scalable and, when used appropriately, effective. Read on for five reasons you should be using PHP for web development. (more…)

While working with FQL I suddenly found a bug in one of our applications. Sometime you need to display how many of your friends added this application to their facebook profile. To do that you can execute the following query via the available REST library for PHP developers.

SELECT uid FROM user WHERE has_added_app = 1 AND uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = {$userid})

The PHP code may look like the following one

function getTotalFriends($userid)
{
global $facebook, $mysql;
$Users = $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT uid FROM user WHERE has_added_app = 1 AND uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = {$userid})");
$NumberOfUsers = count(trim($Users));
return $NumberOfUsers;
}

So what would you expect when there is no friend who has added this application? Definitely the FQL query should return an empty array. Number of elements in that array is 0 and you will get an expected result. But actually the method returns a white space. Thats why count(” “) will give you “1″ and produces an unexpected result. Using the above method you will get “1″ when you have no friends.

Here’s the correction


function getTotalFriends($userid)
{
global $facebook, $mysql;
$Users = $facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT uid FROM user WHERE has_added_app = 1 AND uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = {$userid})");
if (is_array($Users))
$NumberOfUsers = count(trim($Users));
else
$NumberOfUsers=0;
return $NumberOfUsers;
}

Some of you may be familiar with Paul Reinheimer’s funcaday.com. Every day, the site lists a new PHP function, including the function prototype, description, uses and further notes. On Valentine’s Day this year, they chose a rather amusing parody function. Read on to have some fun with PHP and GD.

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Mod_rewrite is a very important library to enable search engine friendly URLs in apache web server. Almost every framework takes advantage of this mod to make user experience more colorful while browsing a page. If you are not sure what is a search engine friendly URL, have a look at the following examples

1. http://your_domain/yourpage.php?param1=list&param2=12
2. http://youor_domain/list/12

In the examples above, second one is more readable than the first one. In fact search engines don’t index pages from a dynamic URL(i.e first example) which ultimately lowers your page rank. Thats why search engine friendly URLs are very important to increase your ranking in search engines.

For web application developers, here is a “how to” to enable mod_rewrite in ubuntu 7.10 (I assume you have apache2 installed in your machine, :D)

Step 1:
sudo cp /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/

This will copy the available mod_rewrite loader to the appropriate directory. Apache will load all mods by reading these loader present in the “mods-enabled” directory.

Step 2:
If you have one virtual hosting (that means your localhost actually points to /var/www) then change the file “/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default” and replace the following line

AllowOverride None

with

AllowOverride all

Step 3:
Restart your apache server using the following command
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you need to check out if the mod_rewrite is working properly. Place the following code in a file named “.htaccess” in your localhost (/var/www) and point your browser to “http://localhost”. If you don’t see any 500 internal error, consider its working

RewriteEngine On

Easy, huh?

When the popularity of blogs was on the rise, it catered mostly to journalists, political bloggers, and young adults. However, a new trend is emerging. Business blogs are currently seen as an effective way to boost sales and increase promotion, and there are several reasons why. (more…)