Back in 2005 when I started this site I had it hosted at Godaddy along with the domain. That was a comfortable thing to do as I only had to deal with one company for all my domain and web hosting needs and requests. That back then did not turn out as well as well. [...]

Part of being a webmaster is managing a domain’s backend which refers to administrative and marketing tasks mainly. Google Webmaster Tools can aid a webmaster by providing useful information and settings for every domain that gets added to the web service. One of the options in Google Webmaster Tools is to set a preferred domain. [...]

You might remember the Internet Explorer Collection which we reviewed some time ago. The web browser collection solved the problem of many web developer’s who had to test websites in different versions of the Internet Explorer. This was a problem as Microsoft only allowed one version of the browser to be installed at the same [...]

If you buy a website or order a new domain you sometimes want to point it to another web hoster or your own virtual or dedicated server. Most webmasters do this by changing the DNS servers to point to the new server or by pointing the existing DNS servers to a IP. The phase that [...]

Do you use Google for your collaboration tools? Gmail? Google Documents? Contacts? Although the Google suite is a very nice suite of tools that has grown exponentially in popularity, there is something to be said about keeping your collaboration tools in-house. There are plenty of tools that will allow you to set up such a [...]

How many times have you installed a LAMP server only to find Apache doesn’t seem to want to run right? Or you install a new module only to see Apache try to download pages as file, instead of displaying them on screen? There are a hundred and one thousand things that can go wrong with [...]

Webmasters and business owners who want to create a new web project face a problem during domain name registration. Should they register the additional domain name extensions of the domain that they want to register or should they skip that step? The first option is more expensive but ensures that no one else will benefit [...]

If you’ve been developing themes, or taking a go at modifying your own, chances are you’ve run into the WordPress Template Tags page. This part of the WordPress Codex lists numerous functions you can use to customize your themes quickly and easily, even if you’re just stepping into the wonderful world of modifying your blog, [...]

I sometimes get asked about my workday. Many people I have been talking to about the workday assume that it is an easy peasy job which basically centers around researching topics to write about and writing articles afterwards, preferably in a very nice environment such as a garden or beach condo. I usually manage to [...]

Broken links on websites and blogs can have several negative side effects. This includes visitor frustration as broken links waste their time and can change the perception of the website the link was posted on but also the perception of search engines, other web services and reviewers that crawl and visit the website. Google for [...]

Some web browsers don’t fully respect web standards and many WYSIWYG HTML editors produce absolutely revolting code. W3C set out standards as to how HTML (and XHTML etc) should appear and whilst some choose to ignore these, some are devoted to the following of these standards. Sticking to standards can therefore lead to issues with [...]

The Mozilla team has launched the Open Web Tools Directory today which offers a variety of tools that can aid web developers in their projects. You are however wrong if you are now expecting a boring menu that looks like any other web directory that you visited over the past years. The Open Web Tools [...]

There are several programming languages that to-be programmers (or current programmers) can choose from. For first-time programmers, choosing a programming language can be difficult. There are many programming languages that are dying out, just aren’t popular, or are just generally hard to learn. It would be a shame for any first-time programmer to purchase books [...]

A few years ago, choosing a company to host your website was an exercise in frustration and confusion. But now, with so many web hosting companies competing for your business, you’re assured of finding more than one company that will meet your needs. Your biggest problem will be choosing among the candidate companies. With free [...]

Up until recently we have been using the WordPress plugin Akismet for anti spam protection. Akismet is supplied with every WordPress installation and needs to be enabled with an api key that is freely available after registering an account at the WordPress website. There have been a few problems with Akismet’s anti-spam scanner in recent [...]

Some businesses host their own web site on their own server (or servers) while other businesses hire a web hosting provider or buy hosting services through an Internet service provider. Once you know the differences between virtual and dedicated web hosting, you will have an easier time evaluating cost, risk, and flexibility in order to [...]

If you are creating a website for yourself or your business and you are trying to determine which web hosting provider to choose to host your site, you may wish that you could get a comprehensive listing of web hosts along with their services, prices, and contact information. Fortunately, there are such references: web hosting [...]

Even for offline businesses, having a website is a huge plus. For those starting new businesses, whether they are Internet based or brick and mortar, designing a website is a necessity. Fortunately, even Internet novices have tools available that will help them develop a fully functional, attractive website. Another advantage that the owner of a [...]

If you have never set up a website, you probably have plenty of questions about how to do it. One question you might ask yourself is, “Why should I pay for web hosting when there are plenty of sites offering free web hosting?” It’s a perfectly valid question, especially if you don’t have a nice [...]

Selecting the right font and font characteristics can be quite a daunting task. The information are usually defined in a CSS file that needs to be edited multiple times until the right font selection has been made. Another problem that might occur is caching that might require the webmaster to delete the web browser cache [...]

If you do any web design, interior design, painting, graphic arts you know the importance of using complimentary color schemes. For many this is as simple as eying a color. For others it always seems an exercise in futility. Thankfully there are applications out there to help you out with your color schemes. These tools [...]

There are two difficulties or problems that Internet users encounter when they want to paste code into forms to display these on the Internet. The first problem that can be encountered is that the website will interpret part or all of the code instead of displaying it. A basic example would be to display the [...]

You might remember the announcement of our new web project Appnews which basically displays software updates in a friendly easily accessible way. What I wanted to do now is to display the five newest items of the RSS feed in the sidebar of this blog to both promote the appnews service but also provide a [...]

The biggest time saver you can implement in your coding practices is some sort of searchable database of all the data you need when you’re working on a project. I mean code snippets, images, data sets, tips & tricks, whatever you use a lot and can be copy pasted. A great way to manage these [...]

If you are running a website, be it as a hobby, semi-professional or professional you need to know some tools of the trade. Webmaster tools can help the webmaster in many different areas like verifying that the website will display fine in all modern web browsers or ensuring that the search engines do not encounter [...]

WordPress is a great piece of software, and allows more than you’d think to be done with simple coding. I bet that a lot of people out there would look for a plugin to do this, but your top five categories can very easily be shown using a WordPress template tag, just a half a [...]

I didn’t have much use for loading ads after my content, since on most of my sites and those I worked on, they were near the end of the code anyway, but while working on a site today I ran into a problem. There is an ad at the top of the design which tends [...]

If you run a WordPress blog, you will eventually want to make some modifications to your theme. Perhaps you want to show your tags, not just categories, perhaps you want the date in a different format, you might want to add the URL of the author to each post, there are a lot of things [...]

Every webmaster operating a blog will sooner or later notice that there are some websites out there that do nothing else than to copy contents of other websites and post them on their own. This is usually an automated process done with the use of a script and RSS news feeds. The script will check [...]

Beginner article coming up, it’s time to get to know the wonderful world of CSS! Cascading Style Sheets, or css, is the standard method of styling a webpage. In fact, you should have no styling in HTML whatsoever. HTML was not designed to be a presentation language, it’s more of a structural-semantic language. In other [...]

If you want to create a simple webpage for yourself, listing who you are, how you can be contected and what you do, you might want to add a few languages in there. You could use Google Translate, but that does not yield the best (and professional) results, so it would be best to translate [...]

If you are an Apache user for the hosting of either internal or external web sites then you know how flexible this web server can be. But did you know you can host more than one site on that server? You can thanks to Virtual sites. You can host virtual sites based on either IP [...]

Last week was a bit less active in web development terms, but here’s a roundup of what you can find on Scriptastique if you haven’t been taking a look recently. We had a look at how a mysql query basically works, which will come in handy if you’re just learning about MySQL and PHP. The [...]

If you are building a large website, chances are you have a great little CSS stylesheet linked to every document which governs all the pages. But what do you do if you want just one of the pages to be completely different? You could of course go into your code and ad separate id-s and [...]

As you all know, we started a web development section here on gHacks. After asking for your opinion and talking about it with Martin, we decided to keep writing 1-2 posts a week here, but move most of the material into a new site called Scriptastique. Right now we only have the blog, but tutorial [...]

If you’ve seen some WordPress blogs or online stores you’ve probably seen url-s in the form of http://somepage.com/product.php?id=4. These sites pass variables to scripts using the url. The script will scan the url for these and you can use them in a database query for example. This is the technology that allows WordPress templates to [...]

The most basic command, and probably the first you’ll learn when taking a look at PHP is “echo”. The first example in many books and online tutorials is the following. Create a file, give it an extension of “.php”, upload it to your server, and edit it like so: <?php echo ‘Hello World’; ?> I [...]

PHP is a Server side scripting language. Its primary competitors are ASP (Microsoft), JSP (Sun), CFM (Adobe), and Perl (often called cgi by hosting companies, although it is not the only cgi language). PHP was originally created in 1995, so as a technology it is fairly mature. Version 5.x is the latest stable version and [...]

Drupal is one of the most popular of all the Content Management Systems (CMS). Drupal can power: Community portals, discussion forums, corporate sites, personal sites, blogs, e-commerce, and more. Drupal is open source (released under the GPL) and the only real installation restriction is that of the database. Drupal must use either a MySQL or [...]

The following article contains all web development articles that have been published in January 09. The articles are provided in PDF format to make them readable on most operating systems and devices. We are providing article compilations to give you the chance to read the articles offline and keep them as reference without having to [...]

Before we try to work with PHP we need understand the role it fills – what problem does it address. The World Wide Web is built on a client-server model. A client computer requests a page which is supplied by a Web Server. The browser then renders the page for the user to view. The [...]

The first language that you need to learn if you want to start with web development is HTML. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, a set of tags and attributes that can be used to create websites. HTML comes with a limited amount of tags and a basic form that is always the same. It [...]

My favorite aspect of javascript is that it enables you to add great features to your site like showing/hiding parts of it when a user clicks a link without reloading, get some data from a database and displaying it in a new div, again without reloading. In fact, it would be possible (although not very [...]

Loops are an integral part of PHP, and many other programming languages for that matter, the basics covered here would apply to javascript as well, even the code is very similar. A loop is simply a block of code that executes multiple times, controlled either directly, by explicitly telling the script to execute “X” times, [...]

When someone starts learning web development they usually start with HTML and CSS, and many people get stuck there without ever experiencing the wonderful workd of server side scripting like PHP or ASP. I’ll be talking about PHP here, but the basic rules for ASP and others are the same though. The most important thing [...]

Part of the beauty of PHP to me is the number of really useful variables that are built in. Some of these might seem very odd at first, but once you start creating pages you will run into some problems which you’ll find can be solved by a function which seemed totally useless when you [...]

Welcome to a new exploratory post here on gHacks! I actually work as a web designer specializing in standalone PHP and MySQL based sites, and I’ve always wanted to write a bit about coding, but it doesn’t really fit my own blog and I just don’t have time to start a whole new blog for [...]

As WordPress emerged the dominant self-hosted blogging platform of perhaps 2 years ago a growing ecosystem of sites and services sprung up around WordPress.org including resources websites, premium WordPress themes and other associated services (and yes, that was a plug for Daniel who used to also write for gHacks). Although no official objections where ever [...]