Tag Archives: php

AJAX is one the nicest concept I’ve seen in web development. The basics are simple and quite easy to use.
There are a lot of AJAX frameworks around like jQuery, Prototype and backbase. These frameworks help you create an AJAX application with ease.
But is AJAX really that good? No, but if you use it correctly, it is!

In this article I wish to share my view on AJAX and the possibilities it gives to web developers and designers, and why AJAX is wrong in several situations.

Ever had this thought: “I want to fire something extra up when somebody downloads a certain file.”? This can be easily fixed by making all you download links link to a php page and output the download file for you. But what if the file is called directly in the browser, say http://www.gayadesign.com/scripts/photonav/photonav.zip? Apache will happily give the file to the user, without me noticing it. Luckily for us, .htaccess is a great place to mess around with Apache.

This article will explain how to make pre-download conditions in php using .htaccess. I’ll make a download counter in this one.

In the first few weeks of my website’s existence, the spam machine left my website alone. But as soon as my site got linked on various webpages around the world. The spam started to slip in. Online casinos, free slot machines and oh-so-hot girls.
There had to be something to quickly protect my site against spam. I know captcha works quite well, but the problem with captcha is that users always have to read unreadable images. These impossible captchas annoy the hell out of me, so that was out of the question.

I know Wordpress has a nice plugin called Akismet which is filtering spam quite good. I’ve been using it for some time on my DS article site, and it has been filtering a lot of spam.

There are a lot of ways to become a better, or at least faster, webdeveloper. For instance the use of a framework like CakePHP to make the developing process rapid.
One of the main things I found boosting my productivity is using a nice IDE.

This article will describe how to create a PHP developer’s IDE using Eclipse, Aptana and PDT.

Since webservices and RESTful services are becoming more and more popular, XML is getting a common format to exchange information. XML is easy to read and has a nice tree structure, which can be easily interpreted.

This post will show you how easy it is to read XML in PHP.

In this tutorial I’ll teach you how to read information which a simple webservice provides. The webservice I choose is Last.fm. It’s quick, fun and has a lot of features. We’ll use the Recent Tracks information of a user profile.