Articles

Wordpress Plugin Does Not Have a Valid Header

Ran into a problem with installing a plugin today that returned a "Plugin does not have a valid header" message in WordPress. I guessed the problem almost instantly but I figured I would share the solution for anyone that might be searching for it. Apparently there have been problems in at least one version of WordPress where an automatic update caused this error but in most cases the error is probably due to the folder structure of the plugin you just installed. In my particular case t...
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Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

WordPress is, in my opinion, one of the finest blogging and content management solutions there is. It is loaded with cutting edge features that are very important in giving your blog or site the flexibility that users have come to expect these days. WordPress has somehow managed to package it's super awesomeness in a way that is both accessible to the average user and, in my opinion, great fun for a developer to work on. Flexibility and a long feature list often come at a price though. ...
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SD Card Technology Shock

While watching one of my favored science fiction shows on cwtv.com I got a bit of a shock from an ad of all things. I've been watching developing storage technologies and among them the solid state drives as of late with some extra fascination. The ad that caught my attention was for a 16GB SD card. What happened here? I turn my head for a couple months and suddenly a piece of media roughly the size of my thumb can store over twice the data that a standard DVD can store!? You can now back up the...
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What to Look For in a Shared Hosting Provider

Shared hosting is a phrase used to describe hosting many web sites on a single server. Finding the right shared web hosting provider can be crucial to your web site. Features, reliability and price will all be important factors in your eventual decision. Haphazardly grabbing the cheapest hosting plan you find without taking time to do proper research may cost you more hair than you originally intended. It really is all fun and games until you spend hours on a major push or promotion to ...
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What is Web Hosting and How is it Used?

The definition of web hosting in it's most basic sense is simple a service provided by a hosting company that allows you to make web pages available to the internet as a whole. Without web hosting you could have pages of HTML ready and lack a way for users on the net to access the pages. To summarize...HTML pages ready to view and no hosting are HTML pages not viewable via the internet while hosted web pages via a hosting service can be viewed online by users surfing the internet. If yo...
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PHP Basic Loops and Conditional Structures

Basic PHP Control Structures This article continues from PHP Vari­ables Primer. At this point we will add something that will actually allow you to use what you know to make simple, useful PHP scripts. I'm going to call them control structures. There are quite a few handy control structurs in PHP but we will only cover the FOR loop and IF along with ELSEIF and ELSE as this tutorial is supposed to be just the basics. Check out the PHP code below... for ($variable=0; $variable<10;...
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PHP Variables Primer

This article continues from PHP 101-Learn the Very Basics of PHP. What in the world is a variable?! Think algebra. The wacky x + 5 = 15 stuff. In PHP it would be something like echo $x + 5;. "$x" would be the variable. If "$x" is nothing then PHP would echo 5. If "$x" were ten then PHP would echo 15. A variable is just a named chunk of memory for you to store information in. Assigning a variable is fairly simple. You could easily use something like var $x=5; or even simply $x=5; wou...
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Legitimate Ways to Make Money Online

I work from home full time. It has literally been years since I've clocked into a day to day job and I've come to the point where it's increasingly hard for me to remember waking up at 4:20AM because the boss wants an extra hour of overtime. I try not to brag and I'm certainly not rich but I realize that I definitely am fortunate. I'm not a guru and I'm not selling a get-rich-quick scheme or an e-book. The purpose of this article is to make you aware of simple, tried and true methods...
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How do I enable Javascript on my computer?

All modern browsers usually have Javascript enabled by default. Click here to check if javascript is enabled on your current browser. There should be a small popup box that says "Javascript is on". If not then you may have Javascript disabled. Turn on Javascript here What is javascript? Javascript is a cross platform, cross browser scripting language that runs on your computer and allows web sites and other media to add some extra fancy effects for you. Do you remember the good old days...
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PHP Quotation Marks in String

There are a couple of different ways to include quotation marks within a string in PHP without causing errors. The below code demonstrates them and then I will explain each. ; Escaping Special Characters With Backslash The above code will output 3 lines each containing "hello". The first example uses PHP's escape character to escape the quotation marks inside the string. This tells PHP that you meant the quotation marks literally. You really want them there and didn't mean them for P...
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Add to Bookmarks Javascript Code

In this article our mission is to build a very light and simple script that will allow your users to add a page of your website to their browser bookmarks. Click here to bookmark this page! You'll see this type of thing on many sites and if you have good content on your website your users might appreciate the extra ease in bookmarking your pages. The Javascript Our bookmark script will be totally self-contained to make things easy for this article. All code will be contained completely ...
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PHP 101-Learn the Very Basics of PHP

The Big Prologue The whole purpose of this little tutorial is simply to get you started with PHP. I am assuming a lot of things. For one, I assume you are familiar with building web pages in HTML and using some kind of FTP client. These things are pretty much necessary if you want to tackle a serverside scripting language. If you do know HTML and can wield an FTP editor and even notepad you will do alright. PHP basics really are not that incredibly hard to pick up. As with just about...
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Problems with mysql_real_escape_string()?

Mysql_real_escape_string() Syntax First let's take a quick look at how the manual says that mysql_real_escape_string() is supposed to be used. Check out the prototype below and notice the "resource link_identified" that is given as the second argument. mysql_real_escape_string    ( string [, resource link_identifier] ) This resource link_indentifier is actually the id that is returned from a call to mysql_connect(). What this means is that, for whatever reason, mysql_real_escape_string() act...
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Cannot Modify Header Information Error

What's a Header and What's Wrong With It? No this isn't a soccer tutorial. We are talking about a common error in PHP scripts. The header we are talking about is a piece of data that precedes a larger chunk and carries information about how to handle the larger chunk of data. Note that this "header information" must precede the actual data. An example would be the header of any file on your computer. There is a chunk of data attached to the top of almost every file that tells your op...
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Quick and Easy RSS Feed Reader

Quick and Easy RSS Feed Reader RSS feeds can really be quite handy in keeping your users up to date with what's going on in the world. Many large sites with RSS feeds offer javascript code that allows users to display a list of current content on their website. This makes it easy for people with little knowlede of XML and server side scripting. Some add RSS content to their sites for users while others for search engines. In either case javascript can fall short of perfect. Users withou...
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Manage Content With PHP Includes

PHP Includes Basics Have you ever had to makes changes on a site that uses no includes and no external CSS file? What about a site with several thousand pages? Do you fully understand what this can do to a developers mental sanity? If not then you probably really don't want to know. It's not pretty. There is a way to alleviate this drive for mental breakdown though. Server side includes allow you to reuse pieces of your web pages by putting the pieces in seperate files and then includin...
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