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Compare Site Popularity

2008-09-08T01:38:00.000-07:00

So how popular is your site?
Here is an article to compare your site popularity . Some of the tools to compare the popularity of a site.
The newly launched Google Trends for Websites lets you view how popular your favorite websites are and also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.

You can check out many other popular services like Alexa, Compete and Quantcast which do a similar analytics profile of websites using various parameters like US traffic, toolbars stats etc.. But Google could be in a more advantageous position to give more accurate statistics.

The main advantage Google has is that most web browsers use Google toolbars, most webmasters use Google Analytics and combine that with Google search and click statistics, site search statistics and Google Trends data - it seems Google should have a better idea than any other analytical service when comparing your sites traffic profile.

So check you own website profile and what do you see.
Note that The daily unique visitors count is hidden, but if you know your traffic and compare your site with other sites, you can get a good idea, like their traffic is double your traffic, 10 times your traffic or 1/10 of it.
Explore the audiences of specific websites with Trends for Websites now.

Compare and analyze your site popularity, how your site is seen through these tools. This is really helpful. SEO your site now.

Optimizing PHP Codes

2008-09-07T03:58:00.000-07:00

Tips For Optimizing PHP Codes

If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
echo is faster than print.
Use echo's multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.
Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.
Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload
require_once() is expensive
Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths.
If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER[’REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time()
See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex
str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than str_replace by a factor of 4
If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.
It's better to use switch statements than multi if, else if, statements.
Error suppression with @ is very slow.
Turn on apache's mod_deflate
Close your database connections when you're done with them
$row[’id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]
Error messages are expensive
Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x <>
Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly the same as calling a local variable in a function.
Incrementing a global variable is 2 times slow than a local var.
Incrementing an object property (eg. $this->prop++) is 3 times slower than a local variable.
Incrementing an undefined local variable is 9-10 times slower than a pre-initialized one.
Just declaring a global variable without using it in a function also slows things down (by about the same amount as incrementing a local var). PHP probably does a check to see if the global exists.
Method invocation appears to be independent of the number of methods defined in the class because I added 10 more methods to the test class (before and after the test method) with no change in performance.
Methods in derived classes run faster than ones defined in the base class.
A function call with one parameter and an empty function body takes about the same time as doing 7-8 $localvar++ operations. A similar method call is of course about 15 $localvar++ operations.
Surrounding your string by ' instead of " will make things interpret a little faster since php looks for variables inside "..." but not inside '...'. Of course you can only do this when you don't need to have variables in the string.
When echoing strings it's faster to separate them by comma instead of dot. Note: This only works with echo, which is a function that can take several strings as arguments.
A PHP script will be served at least 2-10 times slower than a static HTML page by Apache. Try to use more static HTML pages and fewer scripts.
Your PHP scripts are recompiled every time unless the scripts are cached. Install a PHP caching product to typically increase performance by 25-100% by removing compile times.
Cache as much as possible. Use memcached - memcached is a high-performance memory object caching system intended to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. OP code caches are useful so that your script does not have to be compiled on every request
When working with strings and you need to check that the string is either of a certain length you'd understandably would want to use the strlen() function. This function is pretty quick since it's operation does not perform any calculation but merely return the already known length of a string available in the zval structure (internal C struct used to store variables in PHP). However because strlen() is a function it is still somewhat slow because the function call requires several operations such as lowercase & hashtable lookup followed by the execution of said function. In some instance you can improve the speed of your code by using an isset() trick. Ex.

if (strlen($foo) <>
When incrementing or decrementing the value of the variable $i++ happens to be a tad slower then ++$i. This is something PHP specific and does not apply to other languages, so don't go modifying your C or Java code thinking it'll suddenly become faster, it won't. ++$i happens to be faster in PHP because instead of 4 opcodes used for $i++ you only need 3. Post incrementation actually causes in the creation of a temporary var that is then incremented. While pre-incrementation increases the original value directly. This is one of the optimization that opcode optimized like Zend's PHP optimizer. It is a still a good idea to keep in mind since not all opcode optimizers perform this optimization and there are plenty of ISPs and servers running without an opcode optimizer.
Not everything has to be OOP, often it is too much overhead, each method and object call consumes a lot of memory.
Do not implement every data structure as a class, arrays are useful, too
Don't split methods too much, think, which code you will really re-use
You can always split the code of a method later, when needed
Make use of the countless predefined functions
If you have very time consuming functions in your code, consider writing them as C extensions
Profile your code. A profiler shows you, which parts of your code consumes how many time. The Xdebug debugger already contains a profiler. Profiling shows you the bottlenecks in overview
mod_gzip which is available as an Apache module compresses your data on the fly and can reduce the data to transfer up to 80%

More Articles On Optimizing PHP Codes
PHP Lenses
Reinholdweber

Please Add More If you have any

source of Article : reinholdweber.com

Google Chrome

2008-09-03T01:51:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome is a free open-source web browser developed by Google.

What is Google Chrome?

When Google decided to make a browser, they wanted to completely rethink the browser, as browsing now is very different from browsing the early simple text web pages, now we email, shop, pay bills, and run other large application in our browsers.

New Features

Google Chrome is an early beta version, and at the moment, for Windows only, but it has some new smart features.

Google Chrome is running each tab isolated from another, which prevents one tab to crash another, and is also more secure, and better for the memory; when a tab is closed it's memory use is eliminated.

Google added a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, which will make large application perform better.

The start page offers new functionality, a bit like Opera, with your nine most visited web pages, a list of recently visited pages, your favorite search engines and more.

Because it is an open source project, new features will be added, and other browser developers can adopt what they find useful, in their browser.

Google Crome had listed its features in 5 parts

Stability, testing and multi-process Architecture.
Speed : Webkit and VB.
Searchand the User Experience.
Security and the User Experience.
Security, Sandboxing and Sale Browsing.
Gears , Standards and Open Source.

Google has made a comic book presenting Google Chrome:

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

SEO for Blogging

2008-09-02T00:15:00.000-07:00

Things To Keep In Mind While Blogging For SEO

I have been doing research on making my blog at top for SEO and found some of the tips for making our blog Search Engine Friendly, which I want to share with others through this blog. Please put your suggestions for further improvements.

Following are some of the Guidelines that could make a difference:

1. Always keep the primary keyword in mind while writing the article.

It’d be good if you can write an article around the suggested keyword and maintain a keyword density of 6-8%in the whole article. Also make sure the primary keyword is evenly “sprinkled” around in the whole copy.

The idea is to make sure that the search engines can easily make out what the article is about from the following things.
- Keyword density/ Strength- Keyword occurrence/sprinkling
(keyword density is the measure of the number of times the keyword occurs in the whole copy.)

2. Make sure to use tag to highlight phrases containing the primary keyword.

Don’t highlight every occurrence of the keyword but around 3-4% in the whle text and near the start/end of the entire copy is ideal.

3. Use variations of the primary keyword in the article

Use variations of the primary keyword in a healthy ratio of 4% of the entire copy.For example if the keyword is “Flower” the variations would be “red flower” “blue flower” etc and not “flowers” or “flowering”.

4. Use titles for links

Use the “title” attribute for all links external or internal. In the title attribute, give a short description of less than 6 words containing the primary keyword or its variations.Ex:- “More articles on Wedding” where “Wedding” is the primary keyword.

5. Try to interlink to your own pages/articles with the appropriate keyword that suits the content of the destination article. Do not use nofollow attributes while doing this.

6. Try to maintain a length of at least 250 words in the whole article.

This is to make sure that Google gets the chance to scan your copy and collect the keywords from it. If it’s a short article, the engines might not consider it a valid doc.

7. When writing headings, try to make sure that the primary keyword is placed in the first three words.Ex:- “Wedding Troubles – Article 1,2 and 3” where Wedding Troubles is the keyword.

8. Pictures

- Use ALT text to describe the picture. Make sure you have the primary keyword in it.
- Use the “Title” attribute for images where there is occurrence of the keyword or its variations.
- Make sure the pictures are not cornered out (in the code) and lies within close proximity with the paragraph having a good keyword density.
- Use descriptive image paths where there are occurrences of the primary keyword.
Ex:- sensitive.com/troubles-life/wedding.jpg makes more sense than sensitive.com/wp123/xyz.jpg

Source: http://www.dailyseoblog.com

Ways To Optimize PHP Codes

2008-07-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

Be wary of garbage collection, part 2

http://www.hudzilla.org/php/18_1_11.php

Running PHP Script From Command Line

2008-07-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

Control your scripts with command-line PHP

PHP is generally used with the web Server but there are ways we can also run php scripts from command line. PHP distribution also includes a command-line interface which can be used to run PHP programs at the command prompt, much like Perl or bash.

Executable

All PHP distributions, whether compiled from source or pre-built, include a PHP executable by default. This executable can be used to run command-line PHP programs.

To locate this executable on your system, use the following guidelines:

On Windows, it will be stored in your main PHP installation folder as php.exe or (in older PHP versions) php-cli.exe.
On Linux, it will be stored in the bin/ sub-directory of your PHP installation directory.

In either case, you can test it to ensure that it works, by calling it with the -v option:

shell> /path/to/php -v

PHP 5.0.0 (cli) (built: Jun 1 2005 18:32:10)

This should return the PHP version number.

A simple PHP CLI program

Once you've located the CLI executable, try it out with a simple program. Create a text file containing the following PHP code, and save it as hello.php:

echo "Hello from the CLI";

Now, try running this program at the command prompt, by invoking the CLI executable and passing it the name of the script to run:

shell> /path/to/phphello.php

Hello from the CLI

Using standard input and output

The PHP CLI defines three constants, to make it easier to interact with the interpreter at the command prompt. These are shown in Table A.

Table A

Constant Description
STDIN The standard input device
STDOUT The standard output device
STDERR The standard error device

You can use these constants within your PHP script to accept user input, or display the results of processing and calculation. To understand this better, consider the following script: (Listing A)

Listing A

// ask for input

fwrite(STDOUT, "Enter your name: ");
// get input

$name = trim(fgets(STDIN));
// write input back

fwrite(STDOUT, "Hello, $name!");

Look what happens when you run it:

shell> /path/to/phphello.php

Enter your name: Joe

Hello, Joe!

In this script, the fwrite() function first writes a message to the standard output device asking for the user's name. The user's input is then read into a PHP variable from the standard input device, and incorporated into a string. This string is then printed back to the standard output device with fwrite().

Using command-line arguments

It's common to pass programs options on the command line to modify their behavior. You can do this with your CLI programs as well. The PHP CLI comes with two special variables designed specifically for this purpose: the $argv array, which stores the options passed to the PHP script on the command line as individual array elements, and the $argc variable, which stores the number of elements in the $argv array.

It's simple to write code within your PHP script to read $argv and process the options it contains. Try the illustrative script in Listing B to see how it works:

Listing B

print_r($argv);

Run this script by passing it some arbitrary values, and check the output:

shell> /path/to/phptest.php chocolate 276 "killer tie, dude!"

Array(

[0] => test.php

[1] => chocolate

[2] => 276

[3] => killer tie, dude!

)

As you can see from the output, the values passed to test.php automatically appear in $argv as array elements. Notice that the first argument to $argvis always the name of the script itself.

Here's another, more advanced example: (Listing C)

Listing C

// check for all required arguments

// first argument is always name of script!

if ($argc != 4) {

die("Usage: book.php \n");

}
// remove first argument

array_shift($argv);
// get and use remaining arguments

$checkin = $argv[0];

$nights = $argv[1];

$type = $argv[2];

echo "You have requested a $type room for $nights nights, checking in on $checkin. Thank you for your order!\n";

Here's an example of its usage:

shell> /path/to/phpbook.php 21/05/2005 7 single
You have requested a single room for 7 nights, checking in on 21/05/2005. Thank you for your order!
Here, the script first checks the $argc to ensure that the required number of arguments are present. It then extracts each argument from $argv and prints them back out to the standard output device.
Note: You can add more sophisticated command-line option parsing to PHP with theConsole_Getopt PEAR class.
Using CLI options
In addition to passing your PHP script options on the command line, you can also pass the PHP CLI options to alter its behavior. Table B contains a list of the important ones:
Table B

Option Description
-a Run interactively
-c path Read php.ini file from path
-n Run without reading php.ini
-m List compiled modules
-i Display information about the PHP build
-l Syntax-check a PHP script
-s Display color-coded source
-w Display source code after stripping comments
-h Display help
Interactive use
You can also use the PHP CLI interactively, typing in commands and receiving an immediate response. To see this in action, invoke the CLI executable without any options, as below:
shell> /path/to/php -a
You will be presented with a blank line, at which you can type in PHP code. Take a look:
shell> /path/to/php -a
Interactive mode enabled

echo mktime();
1121187283
echo 2+2;
4
exit();
shell>

Alternatively, you can invoke the CLI without the -a parameter, and type in a complete script or code block. Use -D to end the code block and have the CLI execute it. Here's an example:

shell> /path/to/php
echo date("d-M-Y h:i:s", time());
?>
02-Sep-2008 14:54:04
And that's about it! You should now know enough about the PHP CLI to begin using it yourself. Have fun, and happy coding!
Source

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5889263.html

Useful links

2008-05-16T02:26:00.000-07:00

Php class Library
http://www.best-php-scripts.com/library_classes.htm
http://phpsense.com/

JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 3.16
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player

Ammap : Interactive Map Tool
http://www.ammap.com/

Web 2.0
http://webtecker.com/2008/04/09/25-web-20-generators/
http://www.defusion.org.uk/

7 Crucial tips for designing and redesigninga large sites
http://nettuts.com/articles/7-crucial-tips-for-designing-and-maintaining-a-large-site/

PHP Graph Library
http://www.ebrueggeman.com/phpgraphlib/examples.php