If you are a beginner web designer, most probably you have had faced the difficulty to having some dynamic contents on your site, Just think about a small Guest book, some form to be submitted directly from your site, some dynamic results based on user’s previous action……. All impossible with simple html! Although Java scripts can do some of your dynamic works, like automatic form submission by email etc, but this is just client side (all work done on the computer have your page loaded, means you can’t save something to server), another option remains for you is to use the 3rd party ready-made services that enables you to install the dynamic contents on your site, with there half page annoying ads! Or you have to pay them a leg or an arm to remove their text and banners! So if you are serious about your web, its time to think about a tool that can store data on your web server, retrieve and process data directly on server and display just the final results (in simple html) on your visitor’s PC. It’s certainly you are thinking about the Server-Side programming language. Now the major question arise which technology to use? Every one wants to get maximum returns with minimum efforts. And if their is the same case with you, PHP is the most recommended solution. Let see, PHP: Php Hypertext Processor (a recursive acronym) currently most widely-used open source server-side programming language. PHP with the shortest learning curve, if you are already familiar with C / Java, you can start developing in PHP in just next 30 minutes! Its highly compatible runs on any 32 bit or better platform (UNIX / Linux / Windows) without changing a bit in your codes, *1 currently 16,946,328 Domains on 1,348,793 IPs (Servers) are using PHP! *2 Another statistics is that it is supported by more then 98% web servers! Php has remarkable Database support, PHP with MYSQL is really an awesome combination. PHPLIB is a set of libraries with most commonly required routines. If you are inspired of Object Oriented Paradigm, PHP has it for you, OOP support in PHP is sufficient enough for most web programming related tasks, plus their is nothing to worry for the programmers don’t like to use OOP. The most major future of PHP that encourages web hosts to provide support for PHP on their servers is that its really very lite. For many simple tasks PHP running on P-133 with just 32 Mb RAM ran circles around ASP code on an NT machine having P500 with 600 Mb RAM! For more information, www.php.net can be the best start.
*1 Stats for August 2004 from www.PHP.net *2 Missing the actual resource!
An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your
target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new
content on your website without the need for them to keep on
visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership
without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming.
You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request
your feed are actually interested in it because they have
actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to
create your own RSS news feed.
There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an
editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a
simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some
XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I
will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will
be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.
An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different
tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The
file is made up of header information and item information, the
item information contains the actual news items.
The first section of the file contains the header information.
This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding
used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the
file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the
whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title,
description and link which explain the what the feed is about
and what website it is associated with. The final part of the
header is the optional image information. If you use this the
software that is used to parse or read your file can display a
small picture such as a logo.
The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news
item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a
description and a published date. The date needs to be in the
format shown in the example below.
In this article we discuss the release of several
new widgets, but which is the best widget.
You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many
webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the
bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user
with too many items.
Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a
closing RSS tag.
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are
other tags that can be used and these are explained in the RSS 2.0
specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is
ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to
this validator to
validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can
subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to
your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in
future articles as there is far too much information to fit into
a single article.
XHTML or the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is an extension to HTML made by the w3c. XHTML is a cleaner, neater, generally faster version of HTML. Here are some things you cannot do with XHTML: Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. GOODBYE!!! Never use them agian, they are cheap, they are not coding, you are NOT a webmaster just becuase you can make a frontpage website. Also remember these simple things: Tags must close in the order that they open:
Hello
is not valid where as
Hello
is. All tags must close, including line breaks (now ), horizontal rules (now ), and images (now ) The alt is NEEDED. Most imporantly a doctype is needed and a character encoding is recommended. There are three types of doctypes: Transitional: Most used, most friendly, doctype.
Frames -For using frames, duh
And Strict, the mean, scrict XHTML
The most common character encoding is as follows,
A full list of character encodings can be found at www.w3c.org. Also in XHTML tables for layout are a big no-no. Yet most of the time the validator lets you slide with them anyway. Use CSS for layout if you want true XHTML.
