Webmaster Blog

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Popularity: 3%

Check PHP files for minimum PHP version requirement

A very useful tool for many of you looking to release your scrips to the public, will be this PHP minimum version requirement checker.

If you ever plan on selling or distributing scripts, it’s vital that you let your customers know the server requirements of your scripts.  Whilst telling them that your script might use the mod_rewrite Apache Module, or that it requires MySQL database, will be fairly easy to know, figuring out the PHP version requirements of your script is not straight forward, and certainly not an easy task if your script is quite complex.

Doing so would require that you write down EVERY PHP function that you use in your script, and then cross-reference to php.net to see what versions can use each function.

Well, say goodbye to that idea thanks to PHPduck!  These amazing folks have created the script for the job!

Find out all about it here: http://phpduck.com/minimum-php-version-script/

And view an example results page here: http://phpduck.com/resources/minVersion_vBulletin401.html

Popularity: 9%

Today, I’ll be showing you how you can easily protect your downloadable media.

Why would you want to do this? Well, often we want to hide the location of the downloads, to stop people leeching your content. And most measures can be easily swerved.

Here is a method I quite like. I have annotated everything for your convenience.

Filename: download.php

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<?php
$filename = "downloaded.zip"; // this is the fake name you want the downloaded file to be called.
$source = "/downloads/thefile.zip"; // this is the real name and location of the file.
 
if(file_exists($source)) { // check that the real file exists, if so do the following..
 
   header('Content-type: application/zip'); // set the content type of the current page to the type of file being downloaded
   header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'"'); // Forge the download name by setting filename=
   readfile($source); // grab the real file to prompt download.
 
} else { // if the file doesn't exist
echo "Error: File not found!"; // display error message
}
?>

So how do we use this? going to the destination: mysite.com/download.php would grab the file ‘thefile.zip’ from the /downloads/ folder, and prompt you to download it, but with a new name of ‘downloaded.zip’

This is the simplest version of this method. Obviously with use of $_GET requests you can have download.php choose varying files from the /downloads/ folder. Example below:

Filename: download.php

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<?php
$id = $_GET['file'];
$filename = "downloaded-".$id.".zip"; // will forge the name downloaded-5.zip (if download.php?file=5 is requested)
$source = "/downloads/thefile-".$id.".zip"; // will pick the real file titled thefile-5.zip (if download.php?file=5 is requested)
 
if(file_exists($source)) { // check that the real file exists, if so do the following..
 
   header('Content-type: application/zip'); // set the content type of the current page to the type of file being downloaded
   header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'"'); // Forge the download name by setting filename=
   readfile($source); // grab the real file to prompt download.
 
} else { // if the file doesn't exist
echo "Error: File not found!"; // display error message
}
?>

It gets even more advanced once you start playing with more and more security. When dealing with premium ($$$) content, it’s good to use a database and give all your files a masked name, by MD5 encoding the names, storing them in a database with an assigned ID, and having download.php retreive the filename from the database to know which file to retreive. But that’d look a little messy for this tutorial!

I hope you learned something by reading this..

Thanks for reading!

Popularity: 8%

WordPress is the best blogging software available! My recent studies shine!

I haven’t posted here in a while, and firstly I’d like to apologise for that. And secondly, I’d like to briefly explain what this post is really about.

Eager to improve the experience of this blog, I decided to look into the brains of wordpress and all it stands for, and see if it is truly as good as people say it is.  Before now, I just took people’s word for it – and it turns out I was right to do so – but I wanted to really see what makes it so special.

I’m not going to talk about the usual, ie; Easy CMS, Plugin Systems, Widgets, Admin Panels etc – Instead I looked for what I think really matters to a webmaster.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

WordPress’s SEO URLs are undoubtedly phenomenal, we all know that!  But more so than that, the actual on-page SEO standards really are top-quality.  I guess you could put this partly down to the XHTML compliance – that always helps.  But it’s more than that, the use of perfect header tags, quality navigational links, and the absolutely perfect hierarchy of mark-up, search engines LOVE WordPress!

Without any real off-site SEO, I am high up on page #1 on Google for the search term “Webmaster Blog“, and my position is strengthening.  And the best part is, to achieve this, away from the odd link here and there on forum signatures and blog feeds, I am doing NOTHING but posting content!  Wordpress is a fully automated top-ranker!

Functionality:

There is nothing worse than a dysfunctional website.  Nobody likes to have to ‘figure out’ a website before they can use it.. And with so many competitors around, why bother? “I’m sure another blog will be easier to navigate..” – GONE.  Unless your blog is perfectly functional and navigable, you’d be losing out on a LOT of potentially loyal users.. WordPress offers perfect navigation, perfect functionality, and super-light loads.  Obviously this can be compromised by terrible themes and widgets, but the basic structure of WordPress is unbeatable!  As long as you choose a theme which complements the original structure of WordPress, you’re in business!

Speaking of which, I hope to create or buy (if my budget allows it) a nice new unique theme for this blog – I think it needs it!

My advice to you, as a happy and successful blogger, is go for WordPress!  And with the new WordPress 3 bringing even better functionality, now really is the time to soak up those perks!

Popularity: 7%

This article will explain the best ways to utilise the Title tag of your web page effectively in terms of Search Engine Optimisation.

Right, assuming you know your targeted keyword, it is vital for it to be in the title element of your website. But where?

The biggest mistake of all is to think that only the homepage needs the main keyword.  WRONG!

You want your keyword(s) to be on every single page, along with the page’s header.  For these pages, you have a choice to make in terms of what you value more.  Having the keyword present in your title is one thing, but its position does matter.

If you want the main focus to be your main keyword, across every page, you must place it before the title of the current sub-page.   So for example, I would have  ”Webmaster Blog” at the beginning of the title on every page of this blog.

However, personally, I want the main target for my articles to be the content of each article rather than the general content of the site… So I put Webmaster Blog at the end of my Title tag.

This means that the main focus is on the keywords in my headers (as “SEO Tips” or “SEO titles” is what people will  be searching for, if they are to land on this page; so that is instantly given priority over “Webmaster Blog” in my opinion).

How to separate the page title vs. the site-wide title / keyword.

Now you’ll be wondering if there’s any distinct way of separating the two – well, not really.. But what I do know is Google prefers characters like “-” and “|” to separate page title segments.. Characters like “»” can be incorrectly displayed in title bars so it’s best to avoid them and stick to simple characters.

You can however, in the event that you’re using the page keyword then the main keyword (in that order!), you can also use the structure *Page Title* on *Site Title/Keyword*.

This has proven effective for me on a number of sites, but you really do need to just go with what you prefer, and experiment a little!

Good luck with your SEO!  Stay tuned for the next SEO article!

Popularity: 11%

This SEO article will explain how to search engine optimise images, and how it can help drive traffic to your website.

Most webmasters do not realise it, but SEO can be implemented with images on your site, and it is a very good idea to do so.

Why? When users search for images and you have images of the searched description, you will more than likely receive at least one visit from that person.

How to SEO your images.

When displaying images on your website, generally you will have something that looks like:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />

Whilst this is fine for showing a picture to your already acquired audience, it’s not bringing you the full potential audience of those people who actually search for those images – even if you give the page a really good title!

So instead of having your standard picture code as shown above, give it an ALT attribute (alternate text).  The true purpose of this is for when the image cannot be displayed, it will show the alternate text instead to give the audience a rough idea of what the image was supposed to be..

BUT it’s true value to you – the webmaster – is how the search engines use it!

Using ALT text on your images allows top search engines like Google to apply a real title to the image.  Okay you might have a post title which the image is relevant to, but the image isn’t necessarily going to be named the same as your post.  So to name it accurately in the eyes of the top search engines, use the ALT attribute.

So how do I SEO my Images?

Well instead of using your standard “<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />” image code, use this:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” alt=”The SEO Title of the Image” /> – obviously replacing “The SEO Title of the Image” with the relevant text to describe your image.  Keep it short though – a paragraph wont help you, think of it as naming a file, it just needs to be a title for the image, but a relevant one.

Now, go get recognised on Search Engine’s Image Searches now by implementing this handy SEO method!

Popularity: 7%

One of the biggest requests here is for SEO articles, so finally I’m going to start on the band wagon and give some useful tips to get your website high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The first thing to realise with SEO is that you want to take full advantage of every possible place you can in terms of relevant keywords.  This includes your URLs

Search Engine Optimising URLs

The first thing to understand with URLs / links is that if you can’t read them and get a small insight as to what the page is about, how will the Search Engines?  Sure the crawlers will pick up the content on the page but they do take the URL keywords into account!

So, you want relevant keywords in your URL, not /page.php?id=1

Let’s say you have a website about vehicles.  Each vehicle  is listed under the categories for ‘type’ and ‘manufacturer’.

You have a page for a Ferrari F430 Spider under the category “Ferrari”.  A search engine optimised URL for this would be something like:

chuckunvehicles.com/sports-cars/ferrari/ferrari-f430-spider.htm – See the hyphens (-) in between the words? It’s always a good idea to use hyphens in URLs.  Why?  Well simply to define your actual keywords… If you didn’t use hyphens, a search engine crawler may read this as “sportscars” and “ferrarif430spider” – See the problem?  We want to define our keywords without mistake or misinterpretation!

Also, notice the order of the categories? It’s only sensible to make sure your categorised URLs are in a logical hierarchy!  This shows search engines that the page is under ferrari, which is under sports-cars.  You want to build understandable relevance with your URLs.

To create good SEO URLs without making each page individually you’ll need to know how to use Apache’s .htaccess file to retrieve the content.. I will write a post on .htaccess soon!

All the best with your SEO! Come back for more soon!

Popularity: 10%

Hooray! Today is a good day!

Why? I have reached page 1 on Google for the keywords: Webmaster Blog!

I have been straining to get on page 1 for a long time, and it seems all that effort has paid off.

Thanks to everyone who has linked to my best articles, I am sure this has no doubt helped a lot

As a celebration I feel I must do something.. So expect some big change or offer here over the coming week!

Thank you all!

Popularity: 6%

You may have read my last post on Using Facebook to promote your website; this is basically a follow up on that, only using Facebook in a different way for website promotion!

In the last post I was explaining how to use Facebook Groups to promote your website, whereas this article is for promoting your website using Facebook Fan Pages.

What are the advantages of using Facebook “Fan Pages” over “Groups”?

The main advantage is, when you make a wall post to your own wall (also known as a status update), the post is submitted to every fan’s Homepage Feed.  This means every “fan” of your page will see all posts you make on your Fan Page.  This can generate a lot of interest towards your group – but remember, do not spam your fans with status updates because it will cause people to become very agrivated and they may stop being a fan! (NOT GOOD!)

The other great think about Fan Pages is the Discussion boards.  Every time anyone talks on a discussion topic on your Facebook Fan Page, it will send a notice to their profile “wall” saying they have participated in a discussion on *topic title* at *Fan Page name*.. This also attracts people to your page!

Get on with it!  Tell me how to promote my site using Facebook Fan Pages!

Okay… To begin; Click here to make your Facebook Fan Page.

Now, you need to follow the steps it gives you to build your Fan Page.  Upload a decent, meaningful page display picture, fill in ALL the information secions that you can, and update your Page’s info box because this is displayed on every section of your Fan Page making it extra important!

Now go to the Invite Friends link.  Here you will be able to select friends from your friends list to invite to the group – and you will run into TWO MASSIVE annoyances – It limits you to inviting a maximum of 20 people, AND you have to select them all manually! Ugh!

However; I do have a tip to avoid this limitation!  Simply add all your friends to a custom contact list.. Then, when inviting friends, choose that friend list in the “Filter” of who you want to add – then it will let you simply click “Select All” – And with that, the limit also disappears! Genius!

Then wait for people to join!   It helps if your “Friends” are genuine friends because they will be more likely to join if a real friend has invited them!

Now, once a few people have joined (whether it be ten or one hundred), create a discussion topic, and give people inscentive to discuss the topic, even if it doesn’t match your page’s content, just make a discussion topic people will like to respond to, because at this point, what you want is interest!  The benefits of being able to get people to your site only appear once you have those valuable fans!

There you have it, the basics of getting a Facebook Fan Page started and populated.  All questions are welcomed!

Thank you for reading!

Popularity: 17%

Everybody has seen the Facebook Connect feature on Jelsoft’s vBulletin software, but what about an Open Source version?  I asked myself the same and to much disappointment never found anything, but not anymore!

FINALLY somebody has made a Facebook Connect MOD for phpBB3!

Currently undergoing heavy (and fast) construction, the MOD is flying through ALPHA stage and will soon be released for BETA!

Click here to view the MOD thread on the phpBB community forums!

I will keep you updated here when the MOD is available in BETA, and when it’s out of BETA, etc..  So subscribe to the Webmaster Blog RSS Feed for updates!

Wooohooo!

Popularity: 100%