Web Programming - 2010

This section is all about web development, helping programmers to develop the best sites possible.

Google In-Page Analytics: analyse as you browse!

Web Hosting 16 Oct 2010

Google Analytics has been at the forefront of website analytics, ever since it acquired Urchin Stats and made it free of charge. There have ...

Geo-targetting your website

Web Hosting 16 Oct 2010

Does your company have a local presence in many different countries, or do you run a site where it makes sense to keep visitors from different ...

Media Temple: no more FOLLOW_LOCATION

26 Sep 2010

It's not unusual for web hosts to make changes to their platform, for security reasons or whatever, but this one on Media Temple's (gs) platform ...

Like Driving a Car

Web Hosting 26 Aug 2010

When trying to work out what to expect from the various web hosting platforms, consider an analogy with car ownership. Cloud Computing is ...

Frame-busting

26 Jul 2010

Here's some code you may find useful if your website is stuck in an iframe inside someone else's site: if(top.location != location) { ...

How to Flatten a PHP POST Array

19 Jul 2010

The situation is this: You have a PHP script that takes POST data, and you need to pass that data on to a remote server. How do you do it? ...

Show Bots the Content to Index

17 Jul 2010

There are a few ways to tell bots whereabouts the content is on your web page: Google ad section targeting: What is section targeting and ...

Facebook Bot User-Agent

17 Jul 2010

Here's a user-agent you'll need to add to your list of robots: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) I ...

Efficiently decode a short url

11 Jul 2010

I am building a reference of short urls, and for each one need to record its final destination url, server software and page title. Curl almost ...

Behind the bit.ly url

08 Jul 2010

If you want to know more about what a bit.ly url refers to, here is a PHP function that may be of use to you. It first checks what the destination ...

Implementing Facebook OpenGraph

25 Jun 2010

Facebook makes its new Graph interface sound so simple, but what about Facebook OpenGraph? This is where third-party web sites specify extra ...

Sitemaps in robots.txt File

08 Jun 2010

Give your carefully created sitemap a mention in your robots.txt file. You simply use this format: Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap ...

GIMP: Removing Background From Photo

06 Jun 2010

You can use the GIMP image manipulation program (with some dexterity and a lot of staring) to remove the background from a photo. The best guide ...

Media Temple Proactive Against DoS

22 Jan 2010

I have some mixed opinions of Media Temple tonight. On the one hand, I was completely unable to access swinny.net (IMAP/SSH/HTTP) or domains ...