PHP Magazine

PHP Magazine is an online magazine in the form of a blog. There are posts that range many different categories, mainly PHP, but others from within their network of sites. There is information from software and book reviews to articles and tutorials.

Ajax Magazine

Ajax Magazine is another online magazine in the form of a blog from the publishers of PHP Magazine. The Ajax version focuses mainly on Ajax technologies and offers news, articles, and reviews to name a few.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the best sites on the web (also an online magazine in the form of a blog). They have amazing "round-ups" and posts bringing together the best sites, services, and resources on the web. They focus a lot on web 2.0 technologies and provide great content for both designers and developers.

Design Mag

Design Mag offers news, articles, galleries, interviews and more. The website is in the form of a blog and is updated very frequently. They have great resources and devote a section to freelance information. This is often a common thread between webmasters/designers/developers. They are the home of the 200+ Resources for Freelance Web Designers article.

Website Magazine

Website Magazine offers their magazine both in print and online. However, the only way you can see the online version is if you subscribe to the print version. The good news: it's free! The website has forums, articles, and blogs full of content. The magazine contains a lot of useful information in typical article format, usually offering one focus article with many other shorter articles throughout.

Digital Web Magazine

Digital Web Magazine offers news, articles, reviews, interviews, and tutorials. News is updated daily and main articles are updated on a weekly basis and are well worth the wait. The content is very useful and very thorough. They also report on upcoming events around the world.

SD Times

SD Times reports on content related to programmers and developers. In both a print version and online, SD Times has over 60,000 subscribers. They report on recent news and stories, write columns and opinions, as well as providing a job board and resource center. This publication reads more as a newspaper than a magazine.

Dr. Dobb's Journal

Dr. Dobb's Journal is another publication both in print and online. They offer information from a variety of different programming and development topics. Some topics include databases, open source, security, web development, and specific programming languages like C/C++ and Java. They also have a resource center and a blog full of information as well.

Developer.* Magazine

Developer.* offers articles, blogs, and book reviews for all things development and programming. There articles are broken down by categories ranging from software design and quality to legal issues and techniques. The articles are well written, the information is great, and the information is very thorough.

.Net Magazine

.Net Magazine is both in print and online. They offer articles to help developer, discover, and design. They also have podcasts and forums filled with content. They cover topics ranging from flash to CSS to Facebook.

Webmaster guidelines play a major role in the SEO game because it helps you rank better in search results and also keeps your site from being banned by the search engines. Not following these roles will definitely hurt the traffic that comes from search engines. I have looked at and compared the webmaster guidelines published by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Here are the five major items that are common throughout the three different guidelines.

• Content is King - Provide useful information for your viewers.
  • Google: "Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first" (Google).
  • Yahoo!: "Original and unique content of genuine value" (Yahoo!).
  • Microsoft: "The best way to attract people to your site, and keep them coming back, is to design your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in" (Microsoft).
• Sitemaps - Make it easy for the search engines to crawl and index your website.
  • Google: "Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages" (Google).
  • Yahoo!: "Yahoo! Search will retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs available to our crawler" (Yahoo!).
  • Microsoft: "Add a site map. A site map helps MSNBot to find all of your pages. Links that are embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements are not accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your site map" (Microsoft).
• Focus on Users - Design your website with the users in mind, not the search engines.
  • Google: "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines" (Google).
  • Yahoo!: "Pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary" (Yahoo!).
  • Microsoft: The following is not an appropriate technique. "Attempting to increase a page's keyword density by add lots of irrelevant words" (Microsoft).
• No Link Schemes - Don't participate in excessive cross-linking to raise your rank.
  • Google: "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank" (Google).
  • Yahoo!: "Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity" are unwanted (Yahoo!).
  • Microsoft: The following is not an appropriate technique. "Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your page" (Microsoft).
• No Hidden Text or Links - Don't hide text or links so that they are only viewable to search engines and not users.
  • Google: "Avoid hidden text or hidden links" (Google).
  • Yahoo!: "The use of text or links hidden from the user" is unacceptable (Yahoo!).
  • Microsoft: The following is not an appropriate technique. "Using hidden text or links. Only use text and links that are visible to users" (Microsoft).

There are a number of other specifics and guidelines that you can read about in the pages linked above. I have only listed five of the most important ones that show up in many posts and articles. Be sure to follow all of the guidelines for each search engine to ensure that your site will be included in their index. Not following the guidelines can result in your site being banned. Search engines provide a lot of free traffic and it is worth reading through the guidelines.

I have been working on expanding my blog and am pleased to announce a new Webmaster Resources page. The new page contains a large list of webmaster resources spanning four major categories, which I hope to expand in the future. The four categories are cheat sheets (you might recognize these from an earlier post I wrote) forums, tutorials, and monetization options. There are currently over 70 different links, so be sure to check them out. I will continue to add links and categories, but I think that over 70 is a good place to start. I'm sure that you will recognize some of the links listed, but probably not all of them; I hope you find some of these resources helpful! I have included a screen shot below, but be sure to check out the page as well.

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Any webmaster knows the importance of a good FTP program. Although we can accomplish FTP requirements through a command line program, whether it be on Windows or a flavor of *nix, that is not always the most efficient way. A good program is typically advertised as a commercial software application with an associated commercial cost. While this is true in some cases, such as FlashFXP and CuteFTP, there are many options out there that provide great functionality at at an even better cost: free. I have listed 5 of the best below.

You can click on the icon to see a screenshot.

• | FileZilla - This is probably the most popular free FTP program available. It has a large following, in part due to it being an open source program. That certainly isn't the only reason though. FileZilla is not as nice to look at as SmartFTP, but is very fast and efficient. The program uses very little resources and provides all the typical functionality required in an FTP program. It boasts features like drag & drop, transfer queues, resume, large file transfers, and many more. If you don't care about the appearance and you just want a fast, easy, and full featured program, this is your program.
• | FireFTP - This is an add-on for FireFox. Don't be fooled by its simplicity though. It has many of the same features covered in the first two programs. FireFTP supports searching, remote editing, drag & drop, FXP (FTP to FTP), CHMOD, synchronization, and more. Although this harnesses the framework of FireFox, FireFTP is a good choice for many.
• | GoFTP - This program presents itself as the fastest multi-threaded FTP program available, working 314% faster than its competitors. Speed and ease of use are the biggest sellers for this program. GoFTP will also perform "on the fly compression," as well as instant connections and directories through its proprietary technology. It also supports the usual features, drag & drop, and transfer queues. This is another good alternative to a paid program.
• | WinSCP - This program doesn't have anything that I think separates it from the pack, but is still a good program. It supports all the common features like drag & drop, synchronization, and the common file operations. One thing I might point out is that is does offer a command-line interface and batch processing. This is an interesting feature to add because if I wanted to use command line, I'd use the basic FTP programs that come bundled in windows or *nix. At any rate, it works well and is a worthy entry in the list.
• | CoffeeCup Free FTP - This program is a basic no frills FTP program. It offers all the features necessary to be a FTP program like ASCII/Binary/Auto uploads and downloads. It connects to any FTP server, is capable of multiple server profiles, and remembers your server information. It is not the best looking program but it does what is needed and is best of all, free.

What FTP program do you use to meet your needs? Please comment below and let us know what else is out there.

Who doesn't like a helpful cheat sheet to have around? They save so much time and really help you learn what you are working with in an easy to understand format. I have gathered a list of the cheat sheets I have found to be the most helpful. There are cheat sheets from PHP to CSS to RegEx, and I have listed over 40 different cheat sheets to help!

• Design
  • HTML (1) (2) (3)
  • CSS (1) (2) (3)
  • XML (1) (2) (3)
  • RGB Hex Color (1)
  • DOCTYPE (1)

• Programming
  • PHP (1) (2) (3)
  • ASP (1) (2)
  • JavaScript (1) (2)
  • Ruby On Rails (1) (2) (3) (4)
  • Perl/CGI (1) (2)
  • Ajax (1) (2) (3)

• Database
  • MySQL (1) (2)
  • PostgreSQL (1) (2)
  • SQL Server (1)
  • Oracle (1) (2)

• Other
  • Regular Expressions (1) (2) (3)
  • mod_rewrite (1)
  • htaccess (1)
  • RSS (1)
  • WordPress (1)
  • CHMOD (1)
  • Vi (1)
  • Social Bookmark Links (1)
  • SEO (1)

For even more resources check out this blog post on the Virtual Hosting Blog.

Update

Hey everyone. DZone also has some great cheat sheets. They have one of the best layouts available. They have topics ranging from ajax to Eclipse. You can check them out here.

What cheat sheets did I miss? Leave any missing cheat sheets you found helpful in the comments.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working to set the specifications for the new HTML 5. They have produced a document that outlines all the changes, deletions, and additions. This draft is very long and a little tiring to read, so I've tried to create a short summary of important parts. This summary is by no means all inclusive or a replacement for the information in the draft on the W3C's website.

• New Elements - These new elements are intended to provide better structure.
  • section, article, aside, header, footer, nav, dialog, figure, audio, video, embed, mark, meter, time, canvas, command, datagrid, details, datalist, datatemplate, rule, nest, event-source, output, progress, ruby, rt, rb
• New Attributes - The elements listed below have had attributes added to them. There are too many attributes to list in this summary, so I am only listing the elements that have had attributes added.
  • a, area, base, value, meta, input, output, select, textarea, button, fieldset, form, textarea, menu, style, script, html, ol, link, iframe
• Changed Elements - These elements have been changed to reflect the way they were being used.
  • a, address, b, i, hr, label, menu, small, strong, q
• Deleted Elements - These elements have been removed either because they should be used in CSS, they had a lack of usability, or they were confusing.
  • basefont, big, center, font, s, strike, tt, u, frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, applet, isindex, dir
• Deleted Attributes - These attributes have been removed because these, like some of the deleted elements above, they should be used in CSS.
  • accesskey, rev, charset, shape, coords, longdesc, target, nohref, profile, version, name, scheme, archive, classid, codebase, codetype, declare, standby, valuetype, type, language, summary, axis, abbr, scope, headers
  • align, alink, link, text, vlink, background, bgcolor, border, cellpadding, cellspacing, char, charoff, clear, compact, frame, frameborder, height, hspace, vspace, marginheight, marginwidth, noshade, nowrap, rules, scrolling, size, type, valign, width
• New APIs -HTML5 introduces some new APIs for easier web application creation.
  • 2D Drawing, audio, video, persistant storage, offline, editing, drag & drop, network, notification, history, cross document messaging, server sent events
• HTMLDocument Extensions - These provide easier interfacing with the DOM.
  • getElementsByClassName(), innerHTML, activeElement, hasFocus, getSelection(), designMode, execCommand()
• HTMLElement Extensions - These provide easier interfacing with the DOM.
  • getElementsByClassName(), innerHTML, classList

Although I tried to create a detailed summary, there is a lot more not covered here. I would encourage you to read over the new specifications and get a better idea of what HTML 5 is all about. For instance, the deleted attributes are removed from specific elements, so be sure to look over the full documentation before getting too worried about any changes made in HTML 5.

Although this release was a working draft published on January 22, 2008, it is expected to be in development for at least another year if not more.

What do you think about the new HTML 5? Do you have anything to add to the summary? Leave 'em in the comments for all of us to learn from.

As a follow up to my earlier post on how to create your own wordpress widget, I have compiled a list of wordpress plugins that everyone should have. You don't necessarily have to use them all the time; however, they should be installed and ready to go. The list is in no particular order.

1. WP Google Analytics - Easily integrate your Google Analytics code into your wordpress blog and start gaining insights into your traffic.
2. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Easily redirect all your feed traffic to your feedburner account.
3. WP-Polls - Add polls to your sidebar or any post with this easy to use poll plugin.
4. WP-PostRatings - Allow readers to vote on and rate your posts. Easy to use and integrate ajax implementation.
5. WP-PostViews - Track and display how many times your post has been viewed.
6. Sociable - Allow readers to add your post to the major social networks in the click of a button.
7. Google Sitemaps Generator - Recommended for serious bloggers. This plugin generates sitemaps to Google's specifications for better SEO.
8. CForms - Great contact form; easily allows visitors to contact you through a form instead of an email address.
9. Search-Highlighter - Seeing my search keyword highlighted in a post makes my life a lot easier.
10. All in One SEO Pack - This is the most advanced plugin on the list. It helps get your SEO rankings higher, but may take a little tweaking.

[poll id="4"]

What plugins do you use and find helpful? Let us know in the comments.

Cron jobs are commands run by the unix program cron. The cron program takes a specific syntax and runs the command at every time interval set by the user. These are used to automate scripts of all kinds. There are a lot of uses out there for setting up crons with web applications. As webmasters, if we can harness the power of the cron application, we can use cron jobs to our advantage in a number of ways. Let's get right into it.

• How do you set up a cron job?
  • The first assumption I'm making is that you have access to cron jobs through your own web server or your web host's control panel.
  • The syntax for a cron job is "minute hour dom month dow user command"
    • minute - This is a numeric value that can be set between 0 and 59. The cron will run at this minute of the hour.
    • hour - This is a numeric value that can be set between 0 and 23 where 0 represents midnight. The cron will run at this hour of the day.
    • day of month (dom) - This is a numeric value that can be set between 1 and 31. The max value is dependent on the month you will select next.
    • month - This is a numerical value that can be set between 0 and 12.
    • day of week (dow) - This is a numerical value that can be set between 0 and 6.
    • user - This is the user that will execute the command.
    • command - This is the actual unix command that will be executed by the user specified at the specific day and time selected.
  • A * may be used for any of the day or time values if you do not wish to specify one.

• How can we use the power of a cron job?
  • Cron accepts some special values for times and day/date values in order to meet the needs of as many users as possible:
    • Lists – Lists are accepted in a comma-separated list set.
      • Ex: dow = 1,3,5. This would schedule the cron job to run on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
      • Ex: dow = 1-5. This would schedule the cron job to run Monday through Friday.
    • Steps – Steps are accepted in a division style format.
      • Ex: hours = */4. This would schedule the cron job to run every four hours.
    • Lists and Steps can be combined to arrive at the desired schedule.

• Examples:
  • 30 2 * 6 0 startrak118 php -q /home/www/site_backup.php – This cron would execute the site_backup.php file from the /home/www/ directory through php every Sunday of June at 2:30 am.
  • 0 */4 * * * startrak118 php –q /home/www/site_stats.php – This cron job would execute the site_stats.php file from the /home/www/ directory through php every four hours.

Do you have any good tips or pointers to help us understand cron better? Leave us some comments so we can continue to discover the power of cron jobs.

A church website needs to offer its members and visitors a feature set that will keep them engaged and interested in knowing more about the church and its ministries. This will keep them visiting the site on a continual basis and keep members informed and connected. The following is a list of some of the most common features on church websites:

• Calendar - A calendar keeps members and visitors alike aware of what is happening at the church and how they can get involved.
• Sermon Audio & Video - There are multiple reasons that churches post sermon audio and video on their website. Members travel and aren't always able to be at their normal church and like to see what they missed. Visitors that aren't members of the church often listen to other pastors that they have visited or heard before. This feature also allows individuals who are considering joining or trying your church the opportunity to hear what is important to your church.
• Podcasts - Apple iTunes has become the most popular music site. Podcasts are typically sermons, but sometimes worship music that are posted to iTunes. This is an amazing way to keep visitors because so many people are already connected to iTunes.
• Newsletter - Newsletters have been around for quite a while; the reason for this is due to their success at keeping people connected and aware of updates.
• Photos - Photos let a visitor see the congregation and help potential visitors feel more comfortable before they ever step foot in the door. Photos of baptisms, dedications, and children's services can also give potential visitors an idea of what to expect at your church services. This is a great way for members, visitors, potential visitors and guests to feel like they're connected to your church.
• Prayer Requests - Although most churches have prayer requests on Sunday mornings around services, there is a constant need for prayer at all times. "Pray without ceasing" (1Thess. 5:17). An online prayer request area keeps everyone praying for needs that happen throughout the week.
• Online Donations - Donations are always helpful to a church, beyond the typical tithes and offerings taken during the services. The extra can help with side projects or extra missions programs or an endless amount of other possible ministries.
• Staff Pages - About pages are a necessity. They offer a slight glimpse into the lives and worlds of a church's leaders and staff.
• Blogs - Blogs are used to offer the visitors some insight as to how the church bloggers (usually leaders) see the world and its issues. This is a great way to let your visitors get to know the pastors and leaders on a personal level.
• Daily Verse/Daily Bible Reading - A daily verse or Bible reading schedule is a good way to keep a steady stream of traffic on your church's website. It also assists and encourages people to read the Bible on a regular basis and can even help them memorize some scripture.

What are your favorite church website features? What features are needed? Tell us in the comments what you think.

It is not an easy task to be the webmaster of a website. There are a lot of responsibilities that come along with having the webmaster@yoursite.com email address forwarded to yours. The responsibility I am focusing on for this post is website promotion. Thankfully, there are multiple ways to do self-promotion and increase the amount of visitors your website has.

• Prayer and Praise - Prayer is the best way to promote your site. Give God what's on your heart, and he will take care of you. If you are pursuing the path God has laid out for you, then your constant prayer and praise will give you more return on your investment than you could ever measure. God is the God of miracles; he can do through you what you cannot imagine! Give all the glory to God!
• Word of Mouth - I have found that spreading the word to your friends and family is a great way to increase your visitor count. Even if your friends and family aren't "into" what you blog about, they are "into" your success; so they tend to visit anyways. They also in turn tell other people, who then tell even more people. It creates a great chain just by getting your friends and family in on your blog.
• Social News - Social news sites such as Digg, Mixx, and DZone, just to name a few popular sites, are a great way to get some exposure and traffic. These sites allow users to vote on what content they like and if you make it to the front page, your traffic could dramatically increase. (Be sure your site can withstand by-products like the Digg-Affect. This spike in traffic could overwhelm your server and cause down time.)
• Forums - Forums are a great place to post your website. You can typically include the address in your signature. Not only will you gain traffic from forums, you will likely get reviews and comments to help you improve your website. This technique is twofold, because not only do you get more traffic, you have the chance to learn and be part of a community as well.
• Blog Comments - One of the most important aspects of a blog to me is the comments. I see the comments as a way to grow a community of readers and stay in touch with them. I don't just want people to read my blog, I want them to gain something. When I leave a comment in another blog, it is because I found something great in it and want to contribute to that site's growth and development. You can also typically post back to a post you wrote previously that relates to the post you are currently commenting on.
• Guest Blogger - Networking is incredibly important in any business, and blogging is no different. Get to know other bloggers and try to exchange links. Besides gaining a link, you can try to write a guest post for free in hopes of gaining credibility. If they like your post, they may send more links your way or continue to have you post for them on a regular basis.
• Good Old Fashioned Content - The best way in my opinion to promote your website is to blog to your fullest potential in every single post. Don't hurry or rush. Take your time; write accurately, and write in a way that keeps your readers engaged and leaves them wanting more. The content will speak for itself. Search engines will pick up good titles, and the reader can then judge the content. The better your content, the better your traffic.

What has worked for you in promoting your website? Let us know in the comments.