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Spry XML Dataset: Selecting a Single Row

28 January 2012

Some useful Spry code that allows a single, unique row or record to be selected from an XML dataset. The process involves first passing a unique row ID to a detail page and then filtering a single row from the XML using the unique ID.

Spry Dataset: Limit Rows, Characters & External Feeds

25 January 2012

A few simple Spry snippets to limit the number of rows displayed from a Spry XML Dataset, limit the characters displayed in a Spry field and how to get around the security issues preventing xml external feeds to be used.

Custom WordPress Meta Titles – Homepage, Pages, Posts

22 January 2012

Getting into the nuts and bolts of Wordpress PHP in order to customise Meta Titles for the various page types including category meta title, homepage meta title, and post meta title.

Variation in Google Rankings on Different Machines

14 January 2012

Looking at why variation in search engine results can be consistently different from one machine to another. Usually down to personalisation, locational search or results from different Google data centres.

Reset PHP Recordset for Multiple Repeat Regions

07 January 2012

Occasionally in your PHP application, you may need to have multiple repeat regions on one page using the same recordset. If you don’t reset the recordset after the first time you use a repeat region, the content in the second repeat region will appear blank.

Chrome to overtake Internet Explorer market share in June 2012

03 January 2012

Google has recently overtaken FireFox to become the second most popular browser, and there seems to be no let up in its quest to become the Worlds most popular browser… so when will Chrome overtake Internet Explorer? June 14th 2012 by my best reckoning 

Web development predictions for 2012

27 December 2011

2012 looks set to accelerate the evolution of web technologies used at the office and on the move and will to continue to intrigue and challenge us as developers. Here are some of my own web development predictions for 2012

Apache php display friendly server error

26 November 2011

Recently, I’ve started working on a few PHP projects on a local development machine and have been getting frustrating “500 internal server errors”. The machine is a a windows 7 PC running Apache server, PHP and MySQL.

Scheduling a custom php script URL with plesk

25 October 2011

Setting up custom scripts to run automatically has many uses, for example I use scripts for tasks including MySQL database backup and email and managing notifications from website portals. The steps below run through how to set a scheduled task to call a PHP script from your website. Although I’m running Plesk 9 on a [...]

Fetch as Googlebot URL Submission Testing & Review

08 October 2011

Google recently released an update to it’s “Fetch as GoogleBot” webmaster tool to allow websites or individual URLs to be submitted direct to its index, and it’s supposed to be rather fast. According to the official blog, new websites are crawled and indexed within 24 hours which would probably be faster than waiting for Googlebot [...]