Well, during the development of my career I studied different technologies and worked with these technologies and I can’t help but notice that developers seem to have forgotton about 2 fantastic programming languages.

Perl

and

Cold Fusion

They’re both pretty great technologies but why have they been forgotten has anyone forgotten that one of the biggest websites in the world is built with Cold Fusion? Yes, Myspace is built with coldfusion, although the site may seem sluggish at times and hard to work with but that’s majoritivly down to the developers code at the other end.

How about a snippet of Cold Fusion?

<cfquery name="MyQuery" datasource="MyDatabase">
SELECT * FROM `MyTable`;
</cfquery>
<cfoutput>
#MyQuery.SomeRow#
</cfoutput>

fantastically simple, HTML like structure making Cold Fusion incredibly easy to learn and use I almost miss using Cold Fusion but it does have its draw backs.

Maybe Cold Fusion was forgotten because its so expensive to host, either way. This is a great technology and its good to remind developers of this technology.

And Perl, this is a great language. Very raw and to the point but great none the less. My Favourite part of Perl is the arrays see below for an example.

#perl arrays are great!
@MyArray = (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12);
print $MyArray[0];#prints 1

Now how easy was that!? Perl is great, again developers need reminding of these two utterly fantastic programming languages because they are what shaped my PHP craft, and a good developer is a developer who’s had plenty of exposure to other languages to help them better and more logically collate the best solution for any application and development

Well PHP 6 has been announced for a while now, and nothings been heard in a long time about it so just to enlighten some PHP devs I will do my best to update you all as to the plans of possibly the best thing since Firefox came out.

And firstly quite possibly one of the best things they’ve done is removed, safe_mode, magic_quotes and register_globals. Phew! Thank god for that, PHP developers will find these raise E_CORE_ERROR now and will have to build ‘good code’ and perhaps even integrate software architecture to build their applications in PHP.

Bold move by the PHP team, but a good one at least…

And another purely genius amendment is the inclusion of E_STRICT into E_ALL forcing developers to build at least half decent applications (sorry guys, if you’re old school this is bad news) this is GREAT news, here at SEO Positive we get a lot of half baked car crash websites with code that is barely readable and needs rebuilding to include new additions.

A few other changes to appear in PHP 6 (if PHP 6 is what they plan on calling it, sources say that its now just a branch oh PHP rather than a re-release or upgrade but we’ll see.)

Var – normally used in classes is now just an alias for public. Great move of the PHP team

returning anything by reference $foo =& new StdClass – this will give you an E_STRICT error (Watch out Joomla!!!)

Register long arrays is going now, for good. Thank god! I see these in code all the time, and just wonder how old the programmer must be.. (Stone age?)

Freetype and GD1 are going now for good as well, this doesn’t really matter because no one uses these incredibly old libs anymore.

Support for the ASP style opening and closing tags is to go now as well. Thank the lord… ASP? really? *sigh*

Static and dynamic functions being called statically. Not possible anymore, this will cause an E_FATAL from now onwards. (learn your classes people)

These are just a few of the changes that PHP 6 will entail, there are many many more in fact. Too many to list in a simple blog post but I was simply letting all you devs know that PHP 6 (Or any other imminent rebuild/upgrade to PHP) is still an action in the background happening.

I can’t wait for this to hit the mainstream, development will change (and the internet will possibly crash and burn with the number of scripts that are going to die with the upgrade)

Starting an online business is a continuous process, just like a normal establishment you would want and in the future would definitely improve the structure and services of your establishment. It is important to note however that you have to invest much of your time and efforts on developing a solid foundation for your business. This principle also applies in online business and that in this type of business lay outing your plan would start with your initial website design and Search engine optimisation campaign plan. Beginning your SEO campaign would start with knowing the keywords where you would center your campaign from. It is thus essential that you conduct keyword research, keyword research is the process of knowing the most viable keywords that you can use in your SEO campaign.

The main question that may be lingering in your mind would be why is it important to conduct keyword research? Can we just not throw around any keyword and build from that? Of course the answer to it is a resounding no, keywords are the heart of every SEO company and SEO consultant’s SEO campaign, this is because of the fact that keywords would determine every aspect of your SEO campaign as well as the different aspects in your website design. Keywords can help increase your site’s SEO competency via increasing the probability of search engine bots gathering data and indexing your website on the most appropriate category. It is known that websites are indexed according to it’s keywords which is an obvious action on the search engines since people uses keywords, words or phrases when searching websites via the search engines. Another importance of keywords is that it allows your site to be indexed in more than one category since you can optimise multiple keywords. Keywords are considered by SEO companies and SEO consultants as the foundation of an online business where the features of the website are built around it.

To further the tutorial I did on scroll boxes I have decided to show you how to build a drop down box with JavaScript and css, this method is great if you want to add more content to your page but don’t want it immediately visible to any user. Below is an example of this script in action.

Example:

Read More »

The code behind this is actually really simple and is below with an explanation underneath it of each part

<script type="text/javascript">
function setHeight(height){
       $element = document.getElementById('moreinfo');
       if($element.style.height == '0px') $element.style.height = height+'px';
       else $element.style.height = '0px';
       return false;
}
</script>

This is the JavaScript function which changes the height of the div you have your content in, the first line (beginning with $element =) is simply assigning the element we want to hide to a variable, its less code and tidier to use throughout the script.

The second line (beginning with if( ) is the piece of code which decides wither to expand or contract the element we’re hiding, and the line underneath (beginning with else) is the decision if the “if(” returned false

The return false is simply there to stop our page redirecting to www.example.com/# (url with the hash)

Below is the piece of code you need to add to any link, span, p element or whatever it is you want to use as your button (works on images too)

onclick="setHeight(250);"

Hope you find this tutorial useful, this is a great technique for adding content for SEO Purposes