PHP is a programming language that you can use to write Web applications. A Web application can be anything from a simple “contact us” form through to a fully-fledged blogging system, online store, or forum system.
Blog
Here you’ll find articles about website development, WordPress, and other topics that I’m interested in. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome!
How to Start a Blog
What is a blog?
A blog is a website containing articles, known as posts, that are usually listed in chronological order (newest first). Originally, a blog (short for “weblog”) was a way of keeping an online diary, or of expressing your personal views. These days, there are blogs on practically every topic, from news and opinion blogs through to tutorial blogs, fan blogs, and product review blogs. If you can write it, you can blog it!
To add a post to your blog, you don’t need to code in HTML or use an FTP program. You just log into your blog, enter the text of your post, and hit a “publish” button. This ease of use has helped make blogs one of the most popular types of site on the Web today.
Another great feature of a blog is that anyone can easily comment on your blog posts. This helps to attract more visitors to your blog, and makes your blog posts more useful to readers.
So how do you start a blog? There are many options to choose from. This article walks you through some of the most common ways to create a blog, and helps you choose which type of blog is best for you.
10 Tips for Building Cross-browser Websites
In theory, building a Web page is simple: Throw together some HTML, test it in your browser, and upload. HTML and CSS are standards, so a page tested in one browser should look the same in all other browsers.
In practice, of course, things aren’t that simple. Different browsers display HTML and CSS in subtly different ways, while some browsers (we won’t name names) veer wildly from the standards.
It’s best to build your Web pages so that they look consistent across a range of browsers. This is often known as cross-browser (or multi-browser) coding.
While there’s no “magic bullet” that will make a site look great on all browsers, there are a number of things you can do to improve your chances. Here are ten useful tips for cross-browser coding.
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Changing Page Elements with the DOM
So far, you’ve looked at how to get hold of page elements using JavaScript and the DOM, and how to look inside those elements to retrieve their contents.
In this tutorial, you’ll take your skills a step further, and learn how to change elements. You’ll see how to:
- Change the content inside an element
- Add and remove elements in the page
- Move an element to a different position in the page, and
- Manipulate element attributes.
Once you know how to manipulate DOM elements you can start creating flexible, JavaScript-generated Web content.
Looking Inside DOM Page Elements
In my last DOM tutorial, you learned how to access the elements inside your Web page as JavaScript objects. Once you’ve done that, how do you find out more about each element? This tutorial shows you how to delve deep into any DOM element object.
Retrieving Page Elements via the DOM
In the last DOM article, you learned that the DOM represents the contents of a Web page as a “tree” of JavaScript objects. By accessing the parts of the tree, called the nodes, you can read existing page content, alter content, and even add new content from scratch.
In this article you’ll learn how to locate and retrieve the elements of a Web page using JavaScript and the DOM.
Introducing the JavaScript DOM
The Document Object Model lets you access and manipulate the contents of Web pages using JavaScript. By using the DOM, you can do wonderful things like:
- Create tabbed Web pages
- Create expandable/collapsible (“accordion”-style) Web page elements
- Generate Web page content dynamically (on the fly)
In this introductory article, you learn about the concept of the DOM, and how it’s used to access Web page elements from within JavaScript.
Top 10 Free Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site
You’ve created and published your website. Now you probably want to attract as many visitors to your site as you can. Reasons for wanting more traffic include:
- Your site is an e-commerce site, and more visitors mean more sales!
- Your site advertises your business. Again, more visitors translate to more leads and, ultimately, more sales.
- Your site makes money from advertising. The more visitors you can get to your site, the more ad clicks you’ll get, increasing your revenue.
- Even if your site is “just for fun” and doesn’t make money, high traffic can mean credibility, authority, and prestige for your site, and it can lead to bigger things further down the track!
There are many techniques you can use to get more visitors — some cost money, while others are free. This article concentrates on 10 proven traffic-building methods that needn’t cost a cent to implement.
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