PHP Tutorials
One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense — if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google, Yahoo, etc. I've duplicated this functionality using my favorite JavaScript library, MooTools, and another JavaScript library, jQuery.
Dynamically Create Charts Using jQuery Flot and Google Analytics
Earlier in the week I published a popular article titled Dynamically Create Charts Using MooTools MilkChart and Google Analytics. My post showed you how to use MooTools MilkChart and a splash of PHP to create beautiful charts of Google Analytics data. I was interested in seeing what jQuery had to offer in the charting department. jQuery Flot is what I found.
Dynamically Create Charts Using MooTools MilkChart and Google Analytics
The prospect of creating graphics charts with JavaScript is exciting. It's also the perfect use of JavaScript — creating non-essential features with unobtrusive scripting. I've created a mix of PHP (the Analytics class), HTML, and MooTools JavaScript that will connect to Google Analytics, create an HTML table with the statistics for a given month, and use MooTools MilkChart to colorfully chart them out.
Retrieve, Cache, and Display Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count
One way of significantly speeding up your website is by caching information you retrieve remotely from other websites or databases. Caching information is extremely simple and can save your users seconds of unnecessary waiting. Here's how I cache my FeedBurner follower count on my site.
Format Code Inside PRE Tags within TextMate Using PHP
Creating blog posts has been greatly sped up by the use of TextMate. I've created a bunch of blog formatting commands to do various operations on posts including adding paragraph tags, formatting headings, and generating content based on string templates. One of my favorites is a PHP function that html-entitizes (your word of the day) code with PRE tags.
Create WordPress Page Templates with Custom Queries
One of my main goals with the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find the information that was most popular on my site. Not to my surprise, posts about MooTools, jQuery, and CSS were at the top of the list. What do those three topics have in common? The fact that I provide a sweet demo for each of them. Thus I set out to create an easy way to check out all of my demos — the Demos & Downloads page.
Run PHP Files From the Command Line
I've been brushing up on my shell scripting lately. I just got a MacBook and never felt compelled to spend too much time with Cygwin. I'm learning quite a bit now but there are still some tasks that I'd need to accomplish sooner rather than later. I know how to accomplish the task using PHP so I've got that to my advantage. What's awesome is that I can quickly and easily run my PHP files from the command line.
Remotely Download Google AJAX Libraries Using PHP
I don't know how to use all of the JavaScript libraries but perusing their code is interesting. If I'm looking to code something I'll look at how each of the other libraries accomplishes the task. The problem is that you need to go out and download each one. And of course they're all on different development schedules so you'd also need to make sure to grab the latest version of the library. Instead of manually accomplishing that task, I've chosen create a script that does all of that for me.
Retrieve Google Analytics Visits and PageViews with PHP
Google Analytics is an outstanding website analytics tool that gives you way more information about your website than you probably need. Better to get more than you want than not enough, right? Anyways I check my website statistics more often than I should and it ends up taking a few minutes to get logged in, select the right site, select the current day, etc. I found a great Google Analytics PHP API that allows me to get just the statistics I'm looking for.
Quick Tip: PHP & Possessive Punctuation
Automation is great — it means less work for the developer, the user, and the server. Everyone's happy, right? Unfortunately computers don't pay attention to detail unless they're told to. One detail we need to program computers to pay attention to is proper apostrophe usage when it comes to possession. For example, "Chris's" is not correct — when a name ends in "s", no "s" should follow the apostrophe. Coding proper English is simple.