Think Different

I There are few things that people like to do more than give their opinion about a subject of interest to them – especially on the Web. This can be very useful for engaging your site’s visitors, measuring their interest in a topic, or just allowing them to express themselves. Web 2.0, and the advent of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), allow for the installation of polling widgets on your web site, making it easier than ever to take the pulse of your community. There are several different technologies you could use to build an interactive voting widget, but the end user needs to be considered carefully. For instance, you could use Ajax – but this approach can introduce issues with client-side compatibility. You could use Applets, but that’s not a popular choice at the moment – too many web surfers disable the Java VM in their browsers. A very good option, on the other hand, is Flash. Practically everyone has it installed – who hasn’t come across a link to YouTube at s...

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006). When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006). Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%. (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007). It’s quite clear. Everyone hates slow websites . The question is, how can you make your WordPress website faster? Keep reading and I’ll show you how you can take proactive steps towards speeding up your site. What Determines Website Page Speed? The Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed Mozilla Firefox plugins evaluate your site against the widely accepted rules of website performance. The problem is, they don’t tell you what to do with the information they provide. So, I’ll break down the ...

Here's a quick overview of what has changed between PH4 and PHP5. PHP5 for the most part is backwards compatible with PHP4, but there are a couple key changes that might break your PHP4 script in a PHP5 environment. If you aren't already, I stronly suggest you start developing for PHP5. Many hosts these days offer a PHP5 environment, or a dual PHP4/PHP5 setup so you should be fine on that end. Using all of these new features is worth even a moderate amount of trouble you might go through finding a new host! Note: Some of the features listed below are only in PHP5.2 and above. Object Model The new OOP features in PHP5 is probably the one thing that everyone knows for sure about. Out of all the new features, these are the ones that are talked about most! Passed by Reference This is an important change. In PHP4, everything was passed by value, including objects. This has changed in PHP5 -- all objects are now passed by reference. PHP Code: $joe  = new  Person (); $jo...