Web Cash

I just added an RSS feed widget to my site (see the lower right corner – the DZone links). I frequent dZone a decent amount, and I find a lot of the articles interesting.

However, after some thought I became concerned that ten sitewide external links might be a bit of a drain on my pagerank. If only I could add “rel=nofollow” to all those links. But there’s no option in the RSS Widget to do that.
(more…)

Practically every site today has an RSS feed. Now, you could be like everyone else and simply use this as a way to read information as it’s published.

Or, you could use RSS for what’s intended for – content syndication. With Simple XML, it’s a piece of cake to use an RSS feed to add a list of links to relevant articles on your page.
(more…)

Although Google Adsense is easy and convenient, it isn’t always the best choice for monetization. My click-through rate and eCPM is relatively low – but there are other methods to turn traffic into cash.

One method is to sell text link ads. A major ad group on this front is Text-Link-Ads. However, while I’m building up my pagerank, I decided to test out a different provider – TNX.
(more…)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a short article about how to create a multi-page form.

The simple solution I suggested involved a foreach loop that cycled through the $_POST array and sent every value along in a hidden input element. After a bit of reflection (and some useful comments), I realized there’s a teeny tiny security hole in that approach – so I’ve slightly modified it to close the loophole.
(more…)

While browsing some forums the other day, I came across this question – “How do I find a random date in PHP?”

This is a pretty simple operation, if we make use of a few built-in PHP functions – time(), strtotime(), and date(). In this article, we’ll see how these three can work together to find a random date within a given range.
(more…)

This question comes up a lot in forums – how do you send e-mail in PHP?

There are plenty of reasons you’d want to do this. Perhaps you want to send a newsletter to your users. Or you want people to be able to leave feedback through e-mail. Or you just want your users to be able to e-mail the page (or a link to it) to a friend.

How do we do this? The mail() function.
(more…)

Something I struggled with recently was assigning individual style sheets to posts on this WordPress blog. For example, if I was writing a CSS tutorial I didn’t want to muck up my general stylesheet with a bunch of styles – it’d be nice to write a small stylesheet and attach it only to the specific post that needs it.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a built in function of WordPress. Fortunately, you can add this functionality with a plugin.
(more…)

While browsing through dZone the other day, I stumbled on this article – 40 signs you really are a lousy PHP programmer.

While I don’t agree with all of the author’s points, it’s an interesting list of php coding habits to avoid – but that most of us tend to pick up anyway. Here’s a list of my five biggest pet peeves.
(more…)

While reading some forums this morning, I came upon an interesting question. Where is the category information stored in the WordPress database?

I opened up phpmyadmin, expecting to see a “categories” table. No dice. After a few minutes I figured it out – and I decided it might be a good idea to explain how the WordPress database is structured.
(more…)

Ahh, the never ending quest for backlinks.

There are plenty of places to look for free backlinks – some of better quality than others. One trick you can use to build up a decent collection of backlinks is to regularly post on forums in your niche.
(more…)