The easiest way to add common content to all your web pages is to place that content into a separate file to be included into all the HTML pages before the pages are sent to the browser. How you do this depends on which server side languages you have available on your web server. In this tutorial we look at the command you need to use and naming convention needed for the page if you can use SSI or PHP.
The best ways of passing values from one page to another require server side scripting. That way they work for everyone and not just those with JavaScript enabled. There are a number of different situations where you need to pass values and this article looks at several situations and how to handle them with two different scripting languages.
Let’s finish a week of looking at my PHP scripts by looking at my latest freebie. This PHP script allows you to upload all of your images to your web site without any visible watermarks and have the images display on the site with a visible watermark in each image. The one disadvantage of using this particular version of the script is that it has to run each time that the image is requested for inclusion in the page.
The PHP version of my site search script is two scripts in one because both a flat file and mySQL database versions are included along with a module to allow you to transfer easily from one to the other. The actual search facility searches the meta description and keyword tags from your pages which can be automatically added to the flat file or database by the admin spidering function. You can also manually add your own entries.
The script also supports manually adding entries into specific categories or subjects (which work slightly differently from one another). You can also add thumbnail images to the search result entries making it a workable solution for searching image galleries.
The latest version includes a search results page that is fully customisable to match the rest of your site since it uses a page template where you enter special tags that identify how the results are to be added into the page.
Since I started selling PHP scripts from my site I have had three copies of one or other of my scripts stolen. I know this because right from when I first started selling the scripts I have had code in place to at least track when a copy of one of the scripts I have for sale has been downloaded.
The first occasion when I had a script stolen was before I implemented the IPN script that automatically emails the purchased script to the buyer after Paypal clears their payment. Back then I had a link from the page that you get to after making the purchase that allowed the buyer to download the script. In this particular instance the thief simply looked up the destination page in the source code of the page that linked to Paypal and went there directly without actually going via Paypal. Paypal has since introduced a way to encrypt the form to prevent this from being able to be done. What this thief didn’t know was that the page with the download link was set up to email me whenever a copy of the script was downloaded and since the download was actually done by emailing the script to the buyer, the thief had to give me their email address in order to steal the script. Due to the time that they picked to steal my form2mail advanced script I was able to watch them install the script on their site and soon after they finished installing the script I used their new contact form to contact them to advise them that I knew they had stolen the script and would take further action if it was not removed immediately. Since their site was actually part of a school web site competition it would have been very easy for me to advise the competition organiser if they hadn’t complied and removed the script. I am still not sure why they stole my advanced script since the free version would have been quite adequate for what they needed.
The interactive web section of the site was becoming a little messy with pages on web hosting, server side scripting and plugins all jumbled together. This has now been rectified as I have split the plugins and server side scripting page into three.
Even though PHP 6 is still a long way from being released there are already books appearing (such as this one) that cover what that version is intended to include. In this book you get information on using PHP 5 (and 6) with mySQL 5 to create applications that will be very usable on current web hosting.
With Easter now not all that far away it seems appropriate that the latest addition to my site be a new unobtrusive version of my Easter Calculator script. This version not only uses unobtrusive techniques to keep the JavaScript completely out of the HTML but it also includes a corresponding PHP Easter calculator that will, by reloading the page, perform the same calculation for those who have JavaScript disabled.
My JavaScript Blog
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