Software offered by Microsoft includes:

• Visual Studio Professional
• Expression Studio 2 or 3 (1 user) and Expression Web 2 or 3 (up to 2 users)
• Windows Web Server 2008 or R2 (when available)
• SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• Windows Web Server 2008 R2

Webmasters and designers who are interested in joining the program can visit the Microsoft WebsiteSpark website to do so. The website offers a pdf document with detailed information on the program. It is probably a good idea to read thoroughly through it to get a better understanding of the requirements and responsibilities.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark can be beneficial to web design companies who are already using Microsoft software as they get the latest editions for free for the period of three years and do not have to make the switch from other software products. It could on the other hand be a good incentive for companies who would like to expand their services to include Microsoft services in their portfolio if they are not offering them already.

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Sticking to standards can therefore lead to issues with certain web browsers, which lack support for the latest tags or render pages wrong.

The W3C therefore has its own web browser and editor which adheres to standards more than many browsers and supports certain new technologies others don’t, such as RDF annotation. This browser is Amaya, an open-source and cross-platform browser.

Amaya can handle a wide-range of open file formats, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, SVG and MathML.

The software integrates the browser and web editor: when you go to a web page, it can be edited inside the browser. It also instantly displays syntactic errors.

It also integrates the mark-up languages. For example, in a web page, one can write formulae utilising MathML or add SVG shapes inside the software.

Amaya is a reasonable WYSIWYG editor and a good web browser for developmental purposes. It is also good to produce rich web-pages, which include other pieces of mark-up than HTML.

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The benefit of this solution is that it allows to place more tools on the screen without forcing the user to scroll or change pages. The page will only load in web browsers supporting canvas which includes Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome for example while Internet Explorer 8 (and likely all other Internet Explorer versions as well) throw an error and do not display the page.

There are obviously some negative aspects as well. Missing descriptions or information on the screen are probably the most noticeable ones. The only source of information are the icons. A click on an icon will display a hovering box that contains a short description and a link to the homepage. The problem here is that you need to click on each item that you do not know to receive information about it. It would have been better to display the information on the page or while hovering the mouse over the entry.

It is possible to filter the tools by category. Possible categories include debug, code, design or deploy. A search in the footer is available as well which can be used to find specific tools.

The team admits that only a fraction of the tools are already listed on the website. Webmasters and developers can submit tools which are then reviewed by the team and put on the website if appropriate. They have also plans to create a generic website that is accessible by all web browsers. Web developers and interested users can visit the page here.

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The programming language, Ruby, was created in the mid 1990’s in Japan, by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. Ruby is based on Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp and was written to create a programming language that, according to Matsumoto, “was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.”

One of the goals of Ruby is to allow the simple and fast creation of web applications. The language itself satisfies this goal. Because of this, there is much less tedious work with this language than many other programming languages. Ruby is also free of charge. It is also free to copy, use, modify, and distribute. Since Ruby can be modified, programmers can make necessary changes and can code without feeling restricted. Another feature of Ruby is its mark-and-sweep garbage collection which allows programmers the ability to code without having to worry about the need to maintain reference counts in extension libraries. Also, if an operating system allows for it, Ruby can dynamically load extension libraries. Ruby currently ranks as the 9th most popular programming language in the world. There are many online guides where Ruby programmers to-be can learn how to program in Ruby.

Ruby on Rails, often simply called Rails, is an open source web application framework that was designed for Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson and was released in July 2004. Ruby on Rails makes use of an object relational mapping layer known as the ActiveRecord. Because of this, programmers do not have to specify database column names in class definitions. Rails will retrieve this information on its own from the database based on the class name. Rails also has a testing framework built in which allows programmers to write test cases which helps them create more reliable, robust code.

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Once you have a written business plan, it’s time to do some research on which hosting firm is most suitable for your website. You will need to know, obviously, if you plan to sell products from your site, or if it will be strictly promotional. Do you plan to have video? Elaborate graphics? Or just text? Will your chosen host provider help you set up your web site? How many email accounts will you need?

There are a number of things you need to know about the hosting companies you choose among. Perhaps the main thing is how reliable their service is. If you have a business website, you can’t afford for it to have downtime. After all, it’s always normal business hours somewhere. Closely tied to the need for reliability is the need for technical support. Many hosting services say that they have so-called 24/7/365 tech support, but their definition of what that comprises may be different from yours. You don’t want to find out the hard way that calling tech support late at night or on a holiday only gets you to an answering machine and that you’ll have to wait for regular business to resume before getting any actual help.

Of course you should ask your candidate hosting companies directly about these things, but you should do something else too. There are forums all over the Internet where people will meet online to talk about such issues. Read these discussion threads. Ask questions. You should be able to get a more objective assessment of an Internet hosting provider than you would from the company itself.
There are, however, two things you should be aware of. The first thing is that every web hosting company that’s been around for any length of time will have some negative feedback. One or two rants about a certain hosting company shouldn’t put you off. It is possible that the user was the one with the problem, and it is also possible that the company has fixed the problem.

The other thing you should know when reading forums is that sometimes hosting companies plant people on them to say good things about them. The rule of thumb should be: discount the overly positive posts on a company, and discount the overly negative, too. Any post filled with capital letters and exclamation marks is suspect. Take your information from the saner posts you come across, and if you’re allowed to join a forum, don’t hesitate to ask questions, particularly about free web hosting companies.

The reason these companies are able to offer free hosting is that they will run ads on your site. These might be unobtrusive ad links, or they may be pop-ups, or they may be the really annoying ads that follow the reader as he or she scrolls down the page. You have to decide if you can live with the annoyance, and if you think your customers will stick around long enough to buy something.
The obvious advantage of free web hosting services is price. You won’t have to register a domain name or pay for hosting. A free web page can serve as a training site for you as you learn how you want your site to look, or test out new promotions. There are free services like sitemeter.com that will gather basic statistics on your site that can give you valuable information on your visitors. You can find out where most of your visitors come from, what time of day they visit, and how many page views they amass.

You could, if you had the time and motivation, use multiple free hosting providers to set up your site, and then monitor all of them to see if one outperforms the rest. You will likely see differences in the different hosts, and quickly learn which ones are the easiest to work with. You may find that one hosting company gets your site indexed by search engines sooner, and therefore drives more traffic to your site.

Or you may decide that free web hosting just isn’t going to be good enough. All you will have lost is time.

The biggest disadvantage to free web hosting is the ads cluttering up the site. Many visitors are turned off by pop-ups that suddenly materialize as they try to enter or leave your site. And a few will click on those ads and leave your site without looking at anything at all.

Even if you eventually choose paid web hosting for the control it gives you over your site, the free websites you set up may still work to your advantage. You never know where your web traffic will come from. Some of it might come through an old free site you set up when you were just starting out. So, while free website hosting may serve you well as you learn how to be a webmaster, if you have any kind of e-commerce function, you’ll almost certainly want to switch to paid hosting at some point.

But if you’re broke and just starting out, or just learning the basics of having your own web site, then free hosting providers may be exactly the right thing for you.

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Not so with Font Friend, a bookmarklet that simplifies the font selection process greatly. A click on the bookmarklet on any website will display it in an overlay in the lower left corner of the browser window. The font selector can be used to change various characteristics of the fonts used on a website. The options are divided into font family, font variant, font weight, text transform and a html element selector.

The html element selector defines the elements on the page that will be affected by the font change. Included are headline tags, body, paragraphs and the option to select a custom element.

The font family offers a selection of 23 different font families including the popular families arial, verdana, times new roman and georgia. Font variants can further change the appearance of the fonts on the active website.

Webmasters who are currently testing various fonts for their website might want to check out the bookmarklet which can be simply added to the bookmarks and executed by left-clicking it on the right website.

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One of the better scripts to display cached RSS feeds in a website is SimplePie. It might look a bit intimidating at first glance as it provides lots of options to customize the display. It is however very easy to display a feed with just a few lines of code. Start by downloading SimplePie from the website. Extract it to the computer system and upload it to the root folder of the website. You should also create a directory called cache in that root folder and make it writeable (chmod to 777).

Now add the following two lines to the top of the php file where you want to display the feed in. The first line defines the location of the simplepie.inc file on the web server (which is in the simplepie directory in root), the second the feed that you want to display on the website.

<?php
include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/simplepie/simplepie.inc';
$feed = new SimplePie('http://feedproxy.google.com/Ghacksnet');
?>

Now place the following code in the location on the website where the feed should be displayed. This will fetch the five newest feed items and display them in the selected location.

<ul>
<?php foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 5) as $item): ?>
<li>
<a href="<?php print $item->get_permalink(); ?>">
<?php print $item->get_title(); ?></a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

And that’s it. SimplePie offers a wealth of additional functions and settings to display more than one feed or mix feeds. The default caching time is 60 minutes.

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The following list is a collection of webmaster tools that should help most webmasters. Many would consider them basic tools that every webmaster should know and use. Most of the tools are accessible from all operating systems and web browsers.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Webmaster Tools

Each of the three major search engines provides access to webmaster tools. These tools might require an account but will display all kind of information about the website that is related to the specific search engine. This includes crawling errors, statistics about indexed pages, sitemaps and troubleshooting help.

Google Webmaster Tools
Live
Yahoo Site Explorer

Markup Validation Service

The W3C Markup Validation services checks the syntax of webpages. It will report syntax errors which the webmaster should fix as soon as possible as invalid markup can lead to all sorts of problems including browser crashes, broken design or missing elements. It is a good idea to check the source check box on the page which will display the source code of the webpage which makes it way easier to locate the erroneous syntax.

W3C Markup Validation Service

Web Browsers

Testing websites in different web browsers is a must for every webmaster. What displays fine in Internet Explorer can throw up error messages in Opera or Firefox.

Firefox
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer
Opera
Safari

Web Statistics

Web Statistics are tools that record and analyze traffic that is arriving at a website. These tools provide extensive information about visitors (where do they come from, which pages did they access, how long did they stay), referring websites, errors and additional information. Webmasters have the choice to install a third party tracking code or run a web statistics script on their server directly. Running a third party tool will decrease the load on the server as no processing power is needed to crawl and analyze the access logs. Their disadvantage is that a piece of JavaScript has to be loaded on every user request which increases page loading times. It also means that data about the traffic is available at a third party site.

AWStats (Server)
Google Analytics (Third Party)
Sitemeter (Third Party)

Resources:

Robots.txt

Robots.txt files can be used to guide search engine bots on a website. They can allow or prevent access to certain files and directories.

Robots.txt

.htaccess

Htacess is a very powerful configuration option included in Apache web servers. It can be used to do various things like password protecting directories or redirecting 404 pages to another page.

.htaccess

Firebug

If there was one Firefox add-on that webmasters could use they would certainly pick Firebug. The add-on can be used to display realtime information about the active website in the web browser. Webmasters can select elements on the website to be taken directly to the code that is creating that element including its CSS properties. It can also be used to monitor network activity and to debug JavaScript. Several extensions are available for the add-on to increase the functionality further.

Firebug (requires Firefox)

Selenium

Selenium is a web application testing system for the Firefox web browser that can be configured to perform clicks, typing and other actions on the website which can be played back at a later time using variables like different web browsers or languages.

Selenium (requires Firefox)

If you can think of any other resources that are missing in this list let us know.

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Widerbug is a tweaked version of Firebug that has been specifically designed for widescreen monitors. Instead of dividing the computer screen vertically it divides it horizontally by displaying the Firebug information in a sidebar on the right side of the web browser. This is good news for web developers who use widescreen monitors to work on their web development projects.

A previous installation of Firebug has to be uninstalled from the web browser before Widerbug can be installed to avoid complications. The web development application can then be installed and uses the same shortcuts as Firebug with the only difference that the screen is opening in the right pane.

The only possible problem that users could run into are update delays as the developer of Widerbug needs to update his extension whenever Firebug gets updated.

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The tag we need is called “wp_list_categories()” and by default it lists all your categories in alphabetical order. All we need to do is add some arguments to it to modify the default values and we’re done! We need to limit the number of items shown to five, we also want to show the post counts in the categories and we want to order the list by the post count, in descending order.

The “number” argument actually has no default value. The reason for this is that it limits the SQL query directly, so there is no need for it by default. We can add it though to impose a limit, so our first argument will be “number=5″. We also want to show the post counts, so we use “show_count=1″ to enable this (show_count=0 is the default).

We also want to order the list by the post count, so we use “orderby=count” to achieve this. By default lists are sorted ascending, meaning that the lowest post count would show up first. To make the list descending, we can use “order=DESC”.

I also use one last argument in there, which is “title_li=”. This sets the title of the list to be nothing, by default the list is presented with a title. I like to hard code my titles for a few reasons, but feel free to change this as you like. So here is the complete code I used, one simple line to do a seemingly hard task, enjoy

<?php wp_list_categories(’number=5&show_count=1&orderby=count&order=DESC&title_li=’) ?>

If you’d like to read some similar articles, take a look at Scriptastique, a blog all about web development and coding, with great tips on CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL and Javascript and tutorials and screencasts coming soon! You can follow us on our RSS feed, or Twitter where we’re posting 3-4 short tips daily now!

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Webmasters can however utilize tag pages better in their Wordpress blogs by creating so called custom tag pages which can contain any information they want. If you open the page above you notice that it does not contain a listing of blog excerpts but a custom page for that tag.

Wordpress provides the means to create those custom tag pages easily. Custom tag pages can be created in the theme directory of the Wordpress directory by adding a new template file to the theme. This new template file needs to begin with tag followed by the post slug of the tag. In the case of the Windows 7 Download tag it would have to be named tag-windows-7-download.php.

Custom tag pages have a higher priority than the default ones that show only excerpts of the posts. The easiest way to fill the custom tag with content is the following:

Wordpress looks for the following files in order to create those tag pages:

• tag-slug.php
• tag.php
• archive.php
• index.php

Look into your theme folder and see if there is a tag.php file. If it is copy its contents and create a new php file that is using the tag-slug.php as its name. If ther eis no tag.php look for archive.php and finally index.php.

Now simply add content to the file. It might take some experimentation at the beginning but it can be really worth it in the long run. If you have any questions or additions let me know in the comments.

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The computer software supports both renaming operations on file contents but also on file names and supports the use of the two wildcards (*) and (?). The interface of the application is tab driven and the user is working from the left tab to the right to configure the renaming operations. Source files will be selected in the first tab. This can be done by typing them in, pasting them in or using a file browser that unfortunately cannot load the contents of directories into the application. Files can be excluded by dates.

The next tab defines the file replacements. It is possible to define multiple strings to be replaced in here. The options in the third tab contain several important settings like matching only whole words, enabling wildcard use, case sensitivity or limiting the replacements.

The fourth tab contains logging options. A record log will be written by default which will log all operations. This can be changed to disable logging or to log only positive or negative hits. The batch tab is the final tab which allows to execute batch files before or after the operation.

File Substring Replacement Utility is compatible with all editions of Windows including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage.

Update: Program is Shareware. Possible free alternatives are TurboSR, String Find & Replace or Replace Text.

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Eight sessions are displayed per page. Each contains a title and short description. A tag cloud can also be used to display only sessions about a certain topic to narrow down the results. Some sessions contained information about new products that have since been mentioned on several news sites including the official release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, an overview of Windows Mobile 6.5 or the Microsoft Translator Widget which makes use of Ajax to translate a website on the fly without having to reload most of the contents.

Still, most of the sessions are only interesting for web developers who use those technologies as they tend to get technical pretty soon.

Play times vary widely from session to session but usually range between 20 and 80 minutes.

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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 article focuses more on the technical side than how to create specific queries, but we’ll get there in the end too! Just after that we created some simple but effective excerpts from longer text automatically removing unwanted characters and spaces.

We also had a look at website mascots, why you should use them, how to use arithmetic operators in PHP and just today, why a coder should always be well slept (easier said than done). If you feel like taking a stroll down web development avanue visit the site, or follow us on Twitter or our RSS feed!

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The basis of this is to use php code to determine the directory of the page you are viewing and also the page’s name itself. I will show you the code in a second, but let’s say you have a social network site underway and you keep you messaging system (outbox, inbox, new message, etc.) in a folder named “messaging”. In this case you can grab the name of the directory and the page and assign these as an id and a class to the body tag automatically, so it would look like this for the inbox: <body class=”messaging” id=”inbox”>.

This will make it very easy to add new rules in your stylesheet, since you can refer to whole documents in a directory using “body.messaging” and you can refer to specific pages using “body#inbox”. You can now use the same CSS file to change the look of only one page without the need to go in and add new classes and ids all the time. So how about the code to grab the directory and the page? Let’s take a look!

First of all, let’s determine the page. For this we will use the “$_SERVER” superglobal variable which stores a lot of valuable information about the page you are viewing, the IP viewing the page and so on. Here’s the code as is, with the explanation coming up afterward.

function page()
{
$page = substr(strrchr($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'],'/'),1,-4);
return $page;
}

As you can see this is a function because I use it a lot throughout the site, not just for this one purpose. “$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']“ will return the path to the file with the filename from your root directory, so it will look something either like this: “/directory/subdirectory/file.php” or if the file is in the root directory it will simply be “/file.php”. To get only the filename we want to chop off all the bits before the slash (and the slash itself), and also chop off the file extension.

As you can see the first thing I did was to chop off everything before the last slash using “strrchr()” which returns the part of the string after the last occurrence of the sub-string you specify. However, the last slash still remains, but this is not a problem, we can get rid of this, and the “.php” part in one go.

This is done by using “substr()”. The function took three arguments, the string we want to work with, and two integers. The first integer tells the function to start from character 1 (this means everything before that will be chopped off, in this case character 0, which is the slash) and then return everything up to the -4th character from the end. This means that four characters will be dropped from the end.

Now the variable “$page” contains only the readable part of the filename which would be “inbox” or “index”, without any slashes or the extension. You could also create this as a variable without using function. the reason I use a function is that I usually have some extra code in there which allows me to echo the function at once by default, but also to store it as a variable if needed.

Now, let’s take a look at determining the directory. We could take the same approach as before but chop off different bits, but PHP already has a function which will make our life easier, let’s take a look at the code:

function thedir()
{
$dir = substr(strrchr(getcwd(), '/'),1);
return $dir;
}

Using “getcwd()” we can get the current working directory. This will be in the form of “/directory/subdirectory”, so all we need to do is return everything after the last slash and chop the last slash off. We use the same technique as before, so now we also have our directory. Once done, all you need to do is modify your header, which should be in a PHP file to make the body tag look like this (calling the functions as the names for the class and id):

<body id="<?php echo page() ?> class="<?php echo $thedir ?>"">

There are some other ways to do this, some can be simpler or more complicated, this is more like the proving of a point, but it is totally usable and I use a modified version of it throughout my sites. This is not a whole lot of code extra and will make your site better structured and easier to modify.

Please be aware that “getcwd()” can give you some weird results if you changed your current working directory somewhere in your code. In this case you can use a modified version of the ‘page getting’ code, or you can take a look at the server superglobal section in the PHP manual for some more help.

If you’d like to read some similar articles, take a look at Scriptastique, a blog all about web development and coding, with great tips on CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL and Javasctipt and tutorials and screencasts coming soon! You can follow us on our RSS feed, or Twitter and Facebook!

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Right now we only have the blog, but tutorial sections and screencasts are on their way! To keep gHacks readers in the know, I will be doing a weekly short roundup of posts, if you like some of them, head on over to the site, take a look and participate in all the fun! So let’s jump to it, here’s what we covered on week 1.

• Checking MySQL queries for errors
• Creating your first function in PHP
• How the internet works – domains and hosting
• Create cool icons in a flash for your website
• Creating rounded corners using only CSS

We have a few more up there, and you can follow us on Twitter and our RSS feed or join us on Facebook. If you have any questions or comments feel free to let me know!

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<?php
echo ‘Hello World’;
?>

I hate Hello World examples, but this shows what we are doing pretty well. Basically the echo command will write out that phrase “Hello World” (the quotes will not be shown, the single quotes above are part of the code), so if you open that file using Firefox for example you should simply see the phrase.

This seems straightforward, but to really understand what’s happening, and to be able to work with PHP efficiently we need to dig a bit deeper to see what really happens when we echo something.

The most important thing you need to understand is that PHP is a server side language. This means that whatever code you write is never sent directly to the client (the viewer of your site for example). When someone opens a PHP file form the next the file is first processed by the server, and only the result is shown to the user. This is why you will never see PHP code if you view the source of a page.

You also need to know that once the server has processed the file it retruns pure browser readable code. I would say pure HTML, but obviously your PHP file can contain inline javascript, just like your HTML files. Now echoing something tells the server that whatever is echoed should be placed as is into the HTML file. This means that whenever you want to put HTML tags when you are echoing you can do so by writing them as you would in an HTML file itself, like this:

<?php
echo ‘<strong>Hello World</strong>’;
?>

Once the server has returned its result, this is downloaded by the browser and processed like usual, so your “strong” tags wil be taken into account and will indeed bold text.

So what’s the point of sending the server that bit of code if all it does is just put it in like it was HTML? Well, the answer lies further down the road, but basically this is helpful because you can prevent/enable specific of section of code reaching the client, so the viewer only downloads what he/she needs, not the whole file. A simple example:

<?php
$random = rand(0, 99);

if ($random > 50)
echo ‘Number is above fifty’;
else
&nbsp; &nbsp; echo ‘Number is equal to or less than fifty’;
?>

Without really understanding what’d going on I can still explain. We create a variable, the value of it will be a randomly generated number between 0 and 99. If this number which we just generated is above 50 then we should echo that it is above fifty, in all other cases (it is below or equal to fifty), we should echo the other statement.

This is processed whenever someone loads (or reloads) a page, so the variable “$random” will always be different, generated “on the fly”. The script then checks the number, and only the relevant piece of code is returned, so if the number generated is 55 the only piece of code that you will see in the source will be:

The number is above fifty

Obviously this is a bit over-simplified, but in real life this is basically what happens. You can also use this to generate different pieces of code for different days of the week, and the change will be automatic, you only need to program once. You can also use it to create one file to display all your posts (like in Wordpress), so you don1t have to code a page for each post you write. PHP is awesome, start lovin’ it!

If you would like to read more articles like this, take a look at Scriptastique, a new blog by the writer, Daniel Pataki. The site will contain different articles from the ones published here, and will eventually have complete tutorials for numerous programming languages.

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The most common server architecture on which PHP is found is called LAMP (for Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP). All of the elements of LAMP are open source, meaning that the source code of the application is freely available. This means that the cost of setting up a server running LAMP is reduced (No License Fees), so LAMP based web hosting tends to be the least expensive solution available.

The Internet is built on a client-server architecture. On the client side we have the user and the browser. One the server side we have the server and its script interpreter (In our case, Apache and PHP).
Because PHP runs on the server side, we cannot use it for flashy client side effects, things like animations and auto-complete cannot be performed by php because php is only running on the server. For client side programming we could use javascript, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX.

What we can do with PHP is access a database, connect to other websites/services for information, and build a page out of smaller pieces, which we then deliver to the client for rendering.

I think it is important to indicate at this time that there are four levels at which you can work with PHP.

1. Scripting – this is where you take a small script and add it (integrate) into an existing page.
2. Coding – this is where you write scripts as needed to add basic functionality to your site.
3. Development – this is where you write an full application in PHP.
4. Architect – this is where you properly design an application that develop it into an application. Like development but puts a lot more thought into a good foundation.

Depending on your actual needs, several of these layers could be overkill for your task. The following articles will mainly be focused on the first two levels – scripting, and coding. In Scripting and coding we have two primary tasks we accomplish. One makes your job as webmaster easier. The second adds new functionality to your site.

Jeremiah Stover is a Software Engineer and a Business IT Consultant at Pragmatic Development. He has hands on experience and regularly provides practical advice in Business, Marketing, IT equipment and software. His Specialties include interpersonal communications, design skills, teaching and instruction. Right now he spends most of his time developing web applications in PHP and MySQL.

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The following web development articles have been published in January 2009 at Ghacks:

How does PHP work?
HTML Playground
PHP – what role does it fill
Standardizing variables to code faster
Web Development: A brief history of time()

You can download the pdf document by clicking on the link below.

ghacks web development january 09

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HTML is a markup language that lets us describe attributes of the text and blocks on our pages. This works great for simple requests, making pages much more interesting than plain text. However it leaves us with a very simple structure. One page from One url (address) results in one rendered content (every time this url is requested, the output is the same).

To give us more options we have programming languages. Some like PHP run on the server side. They modify the content that will be displayed before it is sent to the client and on to the browser. Others like JavaScript run on the client side and allow changes to be made in the browser after the page has been rendered – usually for interactivity or for adding a feature not normally available in that browser.

The very first thing you _must_ do before getting started with PHP is get a good grasp of HTML (and CSS). Many webmasters use a tool like Dreamweaver, Expression Web or KompoZer. To
work with PHP it is important that you understand the underlying HTML code. You will be modifying this code so you need to be able to understand the HTML well enough to understand what you see.

If you like video training try Lynda.com or VTC.com. If you prefer reading a book try “Head First html with CSS & Xhtml” or if you prefer free web instruction try w3schools.com and tizag.com.

Now that you understand the markup language which is what is sent to the browser (HTML) you are ready to tackle the server side use of PHP.

Jeremiah Stover is a Software Developer at Pragmatic Development. He specializes in client communications. While PD does offer a full range of IT services and consulting, they are currently specializing in website development in PHP/MySQL.

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