This is VERY useful when doing PHP development because as you develop your application you can commit versions of the files to the Subversion (SVN) repository and it will keep track of all the changes you have made. If necessary, you can even revert back to older versions.

One of the difficulties that I have run into while doing website development is how to keep the live remote website synchronized with my local working copy. This is especially true of WordPress installations where editors may be uploading new pictures or documents to the site on a daily basis. If you are not constantly downloading the latest copy of the website, your local copy will be out-of-date and may cause problems in your development.

Subversion to the Rescue:

However, I have come up with a relatively simple solution to this problem, which utilizes the controls within Subversion, to both back up the data on the LIVE website, as well as providing version control for all the site data as a whole. For the sake of simplicity, I will be using a WordPress website as my example, but the concepts here could be applied to essentially any website.

One of the useful features of Subversion is the ability to run what they refer to as “hook scripts” at different points in the versioning process. For example, an SVN repository can be configured to run a set of scripts directly after any data is “committed” to it. (sending data to the repository is called “committing” the data) For this example, this is exactly the functionality we are going to be using.

Before I go any further though, let’s go over some of the requirements for setting up a website and subversion repository in this way.

WARNING: The following tutorial could seriously damage/destroy your website and/or server if you don’t know what you’re doing. We take no responsibility for any problems which may occur from following these instructions.

We HIGHLY recommend that you not employ these ideas on a LIVE webserver until you have thoroughly tested things in a development environment and fully understand how things work. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned!

Requirements:

1. You will need shell access to the server.
2. The subversion repository must be on the same server as the website, and you will need to be able to run subversion commands on the server.
3. The user which runs the subversion repository, must also have access to add and remove files from the live website.

Terminology:

Subversion Repository (SVN): The subversion repository which will contain all the website data. Needs to be located on the same server as the website and have access to the website’s files.

Local Working Copy (LWC): Term used to refer to the Working Copy of the SVN repository stored on your personal computer.

Remote Working Copy (RWC): You will need to be able to set up a remote working copy of the SVN repository on the same server as the website and SVN.

Setting it Up:

The first step in setting up a website to use SVN in this way, is to set up the SVN repository itself. I will not go into detail on how to set up an SVN repository, but for the sake of the article, let’s assume we can create the SVN repository at the path “/svnRepository/” on the remote server. We will create the subversion repository by typing the following on the remote server shell.

svnadmin create /svnRepository

The next important piece of the puzzle we need is the Remote Working Copy. Let’s assume that we can store the RWC at the path “/remoteWorkingCopy/” on the remote server. To do this, we will enter the following shell command:

svn checkout file:///svnRepository/ /remoteWorkingCopy/

Finally, we will make the assumption that you already have a website set up on the remote server, and it is located at the path “/www/”.

In order to set this up properly you will need to ensure that you can connect to the SVN repository. Though I will not go into the details of how to use Subversion here in this article, you need to be able to check out a copy of the remote SVN repository to your local machine.

Synchronizing the Website with SVN:

The next step in this process is to synchronize the current website with the SVN repository. To do this, we will be working on the server and will need to copy all the files from the website into the Remote Working Copy. To do this you would enter the following commands on the remote shell:

cp -r /www/* /remoteWorkingCopy/

cp -r /www/.ht* /remoteWorkingCopy/

These two commands should copy all files from the website over to the RWC. Now, unfortunately, the RWC doesn’t yet know what to do with these files, so we have to instruct it that all the files should be added to the SVN repository. We would do this with the following command:

svn stat /remoteWorkingCopy/ | grep ^? | sed s/^?// | xargs -r -i svn add “{}”

As indicated above, this command should prepare all files you have just copied to the RWC to be committed to the SVN repository. The final step is to run the actual “commit” command, and you would do that as so:

svn commit -m “Website Backup” /remoteWorkingCopy/

This command will go through the RWC and send all the new files you just added to the SVN repository where they are versioned and backed up.

Set Up Automatic Website Updates on POST-COMMIT:

We now have copy of the website stored in the SVN repository, as well as in the Remote Working Copy, but unless we take further steps, these filesystems will very shortly be out-of-date with the LIVE website. We also don’t yet have a way to get changes that we make to the SVN files back onto the website.

In order to do this we will need to set up a POST-COMMIT hook script. This is a script in the SVN repository which runs after every time a commit is called. In order to install the script, simply place it in your /svnRepository/hooks/ folder and make it writable. The script is as follows:

#!/bin/sh

# POST-COMMIT HOOK

# Website BasePath
BASEPATH=”/www”

# Repository Path
REPOSITORY=”file:///svnRepository”

# Remote Working copy
LOCALWC=”/remoteWorkingCopy/”

REPOS=”$1″
REV=”$2″

# Update the current working copy
echo “Updating the working copy ” $LOCALWC
svn update $LOCALWC

# Propogate deletes, adds and modifies from the SVN repository to the website.
echo “Doing Deletes!”
svn log -qvr $REV $LOCALWC | grep “^ D” | sed “s/^ D //” | sed -r “s# \(.+\)##” | xargs -r -i rm -rf $BASEPATH{}

echo “Doing Adds!”
svn log -qvr $REV $LOCALWC | grep “^ A” | sed “s/^ A //” | sed -r “s# \(.+\)##” | xargs -r -i svn export –force $LOCALWC{} $BASEPATH{}

echo “Doing Mods!”
svn log -qvr $REV $LOCALWC | grep “^ M” | sed “s/^ M //” | sed -r “s# \(.+\)##” | xargs -r -i svn export –force $LOCALWC{} $BASEPATH{}

# Copy current website files to current working copy
echo “Copying current website files to working copy”
cp -r $BASEPATH/* $LOCALWC
cp -r $BASEPATH/.ht* $LOCALWC

# Automatically add all added and changed files from the website to the SVN repository.
echo “Adding and changing files”
svn stat $LOCALWC | grep ^? | sed s/^?// | xargs -r -i svn add “{}”

# Commit changes from working copy to SVN Repository
echo “Running commit”
svn commit -m “Website Backup” $LOCALWC

When you put this script in your /svnRepository/hooks folder and make it executable, the script will be run every time you commit something to the repository. Here is an outline of what it does:

Steps in Detail on Commit:

1. User runs UPDATE on their local machine to get latest info from repository
2. COMMIT is called
3. UPDATE the remote working copy.
4. Check svn log for deleted files in the Remote Working Copy and remove them from the website.
5. Check svn log for added files and export them to the website.
6. Check svn log for modified files and export them to the website.
7. Copy all live website files to Remote Working Copy.
8. Add all new files to be versioned in the RWC.
9. Commit all additions and changes from the RWC to the SVN repository.
10. The next time the user runs an update, it would get the latest files from the repository which should be synced to the website.

Conclusion:

The end result of this process is that when changes are made on your local machine and committed to the SVN repository, the script will run, it will synchronize the website with the RWC and then will deploy your changes TO the website.

I hope you have found this tutorial useful. As mentioned above, be very careful as you work through the process of running these scripts and commands, as you could potentially cause major breakdowns on your website. Again, we take NO RESPONSIBILITY for any problems which may result from following this tutorial. Follow these instructions at your own risk.

I would love to hear any feedback you may have about this article. I would also like to hear from developers who may have more experience with this topic than I do and would be willing to make suggestions for improvement.

References:

1. Subversion (software) - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The plugin was developed by me while working for TruthMedia. At the time of writing, it is at v. 0.57 and is compatible with WordPress 1.5 - 2.5. If you have a WordPress blog already, why not check it out!

Nerdaphernalia » Virtual Multiblog for WordPress

Lately, I have been increasingly impressed by the flexibility and power of using WordPress as a Content Management System. The organization I work for has been exploring all the possibilities of using it as a fully functional CMS and so far we have been very impressed. What it doesn’t do straight out of the box, there are plugins for. And as a PHP developer, if I can’t find a plugin, I can make one.

If you have any suggestions for improvements or comments about it, feel free to leave them in the comments area below. Also, we’re always on the look out for good regular expressions, so if you feel that you have one or a few that might be useful to the other visitors to this site, feel free to mention them in the comments.

<?php
 
/* This function will convert line breaks or other tags passed in the $tags variable to linebreaks.  Multiple $tags must be separated by spaces, and must consist of the regular tag text.  Ie. $result = br2nl($text_to_filter, "br p blockquote") */
function br2nl($text, $tags = "br")
{
  $tags = explode(" ", $tags);
 
  foreach($tags as $tag)
  {
    $text = eregi_replace("<" . $tag . "[^>]*>", "\n", $text);
    $text = eregi_replace("</" . $tag . "[^>]*>", "\n", $text);
  }
 
  return($text);
}
 
// Usage:
    $text_to_filter = "<p>This is my <br>sample<br>text.  The default code listed here should replace the br's with new lines.</p><p>The second example is more advanced, stripping out both the BR's as well as the P tags.</p>";
 
    // Example of replacing BR tags (default)
    $result = br2nl($text_to_filter);
    echo "<pre>$result</pre>";
 
    // Example of replacing both BR and P tags
    $result = br2nl($text_to_filter, "br p");
    echo "<pre>$result</pre>";
 
?>

The FormBuilder plugin is a WordPress plugin that allows the blog or website owner to easily and quickly create forms for display on their sites. We designed the FormBuilder plugin to fill a need on our own website. We were running WordPress blogs but had no really good way to have our visitors communicate effectively with us. The FormBuilder plugin does exactly that, allowing our visitors to interact with us easily and quickly.

WarkenSoft has actually been running the plugin on our site for a while now, helping to bug test and preparing for the public release of the plugin. While still considered to be BETA software, the plugin already runs QUITE well and has a lot of really great features.

Features:

• Very easy to install and use.
• Highly customizable form functions.
• Unlimited form fields.
• Accepts creation of most form field types.
• Fully CSS compatible.
• Powerful built-in spam-blocking technology.
• LOTS more cool stuff!

Don’t just take our word for it though, go check it out at formbuilderplugin.com.

I want you to know that setting up and maintaining a website does not have to be either difficult or excessively expensive. In fact, you can do it for under $11 / month. The only thing that might be confusing to some is simply terminology and I’ll do my best in this lesson to explain what things are as well as how they work.

When it comes right down to it, there are three simple aspects to creating a website.

1. You need something called “HOSTING”.
HOSTING is simply the word that we use to refer to where your website is stored. We will use the analogy of a house. In this analogy, your HOSTING provider is sort of like your house. You can put things INTO your house… and people can come TO your house to see the things that you have on display.

When you get HOSTING, you receive something like an address. Just as with a real house, this address indicates to other people where they can find your website. Now, unfortunately, this address can be complicated at times. Usually, it is in the form of a number something like 192.168.125.57. Sometimes, you may not have a specific number at all, so using this address can be fairly complicated for people. That’s why we get the next item on the list called a “DOMAIN”.

This website, for example, is hosted at DreamHost. They’re a company down in California which specializes in HOSTING and they’re both good and inexpensive. In fact, we very highly recommend them. For under $10 / month, they provide everything that we need to run this website, and they make it VERY easy to use. Check out DreamHost if you’re looking for somewhere good to host your websites.

We also have HOSTING COUPONS for $50 OFF. Click for more info.

2. You need what is called a “DOMAIN”.
Now a DOMAIN can be compared to a nickname or shorter name for the actual address of your website. If you are still thinking of your website as a house with an address, the DOMAIN would be something similar to a shortcut to that address. When you tell your friends to come over to your house, you don’t usually say “Come to my place at 12345 BOX 432 on This or That Street in MyCity of MyCountry with MyPostalCode”. That would probably confuse more people than it would help. Rather you say “Come to James’ place”. In the same way, a DOMAIN is a shortcut to your website.

Now, typically domains can cost anywhere between $5 and $100 / year, but most average domains cost about $10 / year. If you’ve chosen to host with DreamHost as we recommended above, they provide one domain for FREE so you don’t even have to worry about how or where to get one. You can also buy additional domains from them for about $10 / year.

3. You need “CONTENT”.
In the house analogy, this would be the same as having stuff in your house that people can look at, or interact with. Now, the type of content you want to have in your website will make a difference when choosing how to arrange that content. The content in your site can be as simple as a single page which never changes and just tells a little about who you are, or as complex as a fully automated online store.

This is where the process can get somewhat expensive, but only if you let it. So far, we’ve spent a sum total of approximately $11 / month, which isn’t bad for owning a house… er… website. Things can get pricey though when you start to design complicated sites. For example, if you did extensive bead-work, and wanted to sell your products online, with a fully automated store, you would probably need to pay someone to set up the store for you in a way that would be easy to update with new products as you get them.

On the other hand, most people looking to start out with a website, simply want a place to put their thoughts (like a blog) or somewhere to experiment with various Internet technologies. In this case, you shouldn’t really need to pay anything more than the $11 that we already have.

Say, for example, that you simply want a blog. Somewhere to put family news, or develop a community around something that you enjoy doing. DreamHost offers blogging software that can be installed and fully operational on your site with as little as 2 or 3 clicks of the mouse. They use a blogging software product called “WordPress” which is free to use, and allows you to keep your blog up-to-date without ever having to touch any code or programming behind the scenes. Just click what you want, and they do all the work of setting it up.

And SUDDENLY… we have a fully functional website, which your friends can visit and your family can keep in touch. Pretty cool eh? And all for less than $11 / month.

If you have more questions about it, or would like to talk to me further about the whole process, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave your comments in the comments area below.

Campus Crusade for Christ is a Christian organization which works to bring hope to hurting people around the world. We do this in a number of ways, including sharing the good news that Jesus Christ has saved each one of us from our sins. Campus Crusade also works with a number of other agencies including the “Global Aid Network”, providing relief supplies to countries dealing with local crises, and assisting with projects that promote sustainable development.

As one of the main developers of Campus Crusade’s Internet presence, TruthMedia seeks to bring the same message of hope to hurting people on the Internet.

We build online communities where the message of Jesus’ salvation is shared, and spiritual growth takes place. Activities include evangelistic websites, spiritual chat rooms, training online mentors, and support for other groups wanting to develop their own Internet ministry. (www.crusade.org)

Because of the fact that TruthMedia is non-profit, I am required to raise all the costs associated with my employment there as tax deductible donations from people who want to support the work that we do. These costs include things like my salary, medical benefits and any other costs associated with being an employee.

In light of that, part of my job involves going to people and asking them to consider helping to support me in this ministry. I would like to do that here. If you would be willing to consider helping me financially in this ministry, I would LOVE to talk to you more about it. Feel free to email me through the contact form on this site with your thoughts or questions. OR, if you would like to donate directly to my ministry, feel free to do so using one of the following links:

• Canadian Donation - Will receive a Canadian tax receipt
• USA Donation - Will receive a US tax receipt

Please choose the donation link which pertains to your location. Doing this will allow you to receive a tax deductible receipt for the appropriate country.

Thank you so much for your consideration of me in this ministry.
Have a great day,

James Warkentin

Have a good one,
the Blog Admin.

Fortunately, the most common website mistakes are very easy to prevent or fix. Here’s a guide to doing just that.

Taken from http://websitehelpers.com/design/.
Written by Michael Bluejay.

Avoid Distractions

A. Don’t distract your visitors with blinking text, scrolling text, animated GIFs, or sound files.

Animation and sounds are distracting. How can anyone read what’s on your site when they’re subjected to the equivalent of someone standing next to them poking them in the shoulder repeatedly? Also, visitors who have dial-up connections instead of high-speed connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will. Research shows that animated banner ads may be no more effective than static ads, anyway.

B. Don’t annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.

Nobody likes them. They waste time and space.

C. Avoid clutter.

Don’t just throw a bunch of stuff up on your page in a haphazard fashion, forcing visitors to pick out content like it’s a jigsaw puzzle. (Maybe this seems obvious, but people do creates sites like this, so it’s apparently not obvious to everyone.)

On November 9′th, 2006, the creators of Text-Link-Ads launched their latest endeavor called ReviewMe. ReviewMe is intended to bring together the blog-sphere and advertising worlds, by inviting sponsors to submit their products for a paid review and by paying bloggers to review those same products.

Concept:
The concept is simple enough. Bloggers seeking a little extra income can submit their blog for inclusion in the reviewing community. If accepted, their site will become available for sponsors to purchase reviews on. Advertisers can log into the ReviewMe website, define products or services that they would like to have reviewed and then proceed to purchase reviews on blogs in the reviewing community.

Guidelines:
Of course, there are certain guidelines that the blogs have to meet such as traffic requirements, page rank and possibly Alexa ranking. If they qualify though, the blogger is given full control over whether or not they wish to review the product. If the blogger accepts the review task, they are given 48 hours to complete the review and notify the sponsor of it’s location.

Payment:
The cost of the reviews is based directly on the popularity of the blog. For the advertisers, reviews start at $40 USD and go up from there. This money is split evenly between the writer of the review, and the ReviewMe site. Payments to the writers are are made every month between the 1’st and 4′th. Payments can be received either by check or PayPal.

Concluding Remarks:
While it may not replace your day job, if you’ve got a reasonably popular blog and a love for writing, you could definitely use this resource as an opportunity to earn some revenue through your site. The signup process is simple and easy, and full control over your reviews means you only have to review the things you want your visitors to see. In other words, no unwanted spam!

From an advertising perspective this is a great opportunity to advertise your product or service to people who want to hear about it, in a way that is unobtrusive and highly effective! It generates word of mouth buzz, gets you great feedback and taps into the incredible power of the blogging world.

All in all, it sounds like a win-win for both advertisers and bloggers. Check it out for yourself at http://www.reviewme.com.

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites within Ireland and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as ‘Website Design’ and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as ‘Website Design Tips for Search Engine Optimization’. After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about ‘Website Design’.

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100’s of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their ‘favourites’.

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid… lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine ’spiders’ or ‘robots’ to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn’t have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying ‘click here’ is not enough to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and Javascript it’s important to know that search engine spiders can’t read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, ‘If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it’.

If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

Original content found at: wHiN

Open Source Web Design is a place to download free web designs and share yours with others. We help make the internet a prettier place. - oswd.org

All the website designs can be easily previewed and downloaded, and come with source images along with everything else you will need to make a great looking website. Some also come with multiple stylesheets, allowing you to easily tailor the look and feel of your particular website. You can even contact the author of any given design in the event that you have questions or just want to hire them to design MORE stuff for you.

All-in-all, the Open Source Web Design site is a pretty useful tool for any website designer to keep in their ‘back pocket’.

This can cause difficulties when, for example, you might want to build a web page with multiple columns. Where table columns would all expand together to fit the column with the most content, CSS columns are typically controlled individually. As such, it can be a challenge to build a three column website where all columns are equal height and can flex with the amount of content within them.

Fortunately, solutions DO exist. One of the best solutions to this problem that I have found so far, can be found at this link: 3 col layout with equalizing columns and footer

In his example, the author has created a flexible CSS layout that will run a three column website, leaving the columns to be flexible enough to grow or shrink as content demands. This design also demonstrates the ability to keep the footer at the bottom of the page, regardless of lack of content. If there is more content than room on the page, the column will extend down. However, if there is less content than needed to fill the page, the footer will stay fixed at the bottom of the window.

This is useful in both helping you to know whether a particular keyword or phrase is popular, as well as helping you to find other keywords or phrases that might be easier to target. You might see that a particular keyword has huge results in the keyword selector tool, but good luck getting first page search engine results for that word. Then you notice that there are five other phrases related to that same keyword, which would be much easier to target, and together would yield more results than the initial word you were aiming for.

Now, CSS allows us to begin experimenting with other methods of creating rounded corners. One of these methods is being called ‘Spiffy Corners‘ and allows us to make anti-aliased rounded corners with pure CSS. No images required.

Source: Spiffy Corners - Making anti-aliased rounded corners with CSS

1. Not following basic typographic rules
2. Being too creative with navigation
3. Creating a cluttered navigation system
4. Making sure the site requires certain technology to work
5. Thinking that accessibility is only about blind people
6. Ignoring web standards
7. Not keeping search engines in mind from the start
8. Basing the site structure on your organisation structure
9. Using grey text on grey background
10. Skipping the feasibility study

Source: Ten deadly sins of web design | 456 Berea Street

Not only do you need votes for your website, but the votes must be relevant. For example, if you have a website about Google PageRank, and have hundreds of websites about footwear that link to you, those votes really don’t count for much as far as Google is concerned. If on the other hand, you have websites about search engine optimization or text-link relevancy linking to you, those votes will be considered far more valuable.

The other factor in this system is the PageRank (PR) of the websites that link to you. Having numerous PR 2 sites linking to yours is not as valuable as links from a few PR 8 sites. Therefore, in your website promotion and marketing, it would make the most sense to work on getting quality (high PR), relevant links pointing to your site, rather than spamming your URL out to hundreds of sites with no PR and no relevancy to your content.

One way that you can get quality links pointing to your website is to buy them. Often it can be difficult to convince a site with a high PageRank to link to your little PR 2 website, but programs like Text Link Ads allow you to browse through their list of websites, find relevant sites with higher PR, and purchase links on those sites pointing to your own.

For a more detailed analysis of how Google PageRank works, check out this page on webworkshop.net.

You can find it, along with more details, at puzzle-ads.warkensoft.com Feel free to check it out and let me know your thoughts on it. I’d love to hear your opinion. You may even want to participate!

This is exactly what The Occasional Joke blog is hoping to provide. This blog is offering it’s readers the opportunity to syndicate the daily jokes onto their own blogs and websites. Anyone running a PHP enabled site can syndicate the latest Occasional Joke to a page on their own site, with just a brief bit of code.

There is also a WordPress plugin developed specifically for people wanting to run Occasional Jokes on their own WordPress blogs as well.

It also has the added ability for sending an automated response to the person who fills out the form. Different responses can be used for different forms, and can even be personalized to the user, based on form fields they enter.

Click here to read more about the person who created these resources and is offering them for you to use.

Requirements: PHP

Features:
Form Submission
Convert form submitted data to an email which can be received by the webmaster.

Destination Email
Set one or multiple recipients of the email generated from the form data.

Required Fields
The form can be set up to require certain fields to be filled out before a successful submission can be made.

Followup URL
Send your website visitors to a “Thank You” page once they have successfully filled out the form on your website.

Automated Response
In addition to emailing the form data to the webmaster, the FormContact system can create a customized email response to be set back to the user who filled out the form, based on what data they have entered into the form. Excellent for followup of clients, adding that small extra touch of connection to let them know that they have been heard, and will be contacted further shortly.

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For the most part, websites follow fairly basic guidelines when it comes to design. This is partly due to the nature and limitations of a browser screen and partly due to the way in which people naturally read a screen or page. As such, it would make sense that a general set of guidelines for the design of a site could be found. Unfortunately, as standardized CSS is a relatively new technology, the guidelines and best practices in it’s use have not yet been completely set. There are many ways to use CSS in the design of a page, to achieve the same results.

An even greater problem is the fact that CSS still has some shortcomings when it comes to the separation of design and content. While working with CSS for the layout of a site, one must still work within the confines of the HTML code of the page and that is where the problem exists.

Solutions to this problem do exist, and one of the best found so far is entitled In search of the One True Layout. This article lays out in detail, the best ways in which to get around the problems of Total Layout Flexibility, Equal Height Columns and Vertical placement of elements across grids/columns.

Written in 1995 by Alex Robinson and regularly updated since then, the online book is complete with CSS Coding Examples, CSS Best Practices and numerous solutions to design related CSS problems. This is recommended reading for ANY designer or developer, interested in understanding some of the better ways in which to build sites using CSS.