thedesignstudent

Does anyone do any programming with C++ or design applications with Ruby? I downloaded Rails and had it up and running and I was looking through the Chilkat library and some other bits and pieces of libraries on the open source sites. Mostly spending a lot of time with the Wiki learning the basics of what I can do. Curious to see who's a programmer and to know if you've designed any web or desktop aps. Can we check them out? Thanks! Oh yeah, I like the idea of being able to create a console for my web sites that allows me to do updates behind the scenes and globally change the sites content, or being able to create my own forums like Vanilla from the ground up, or to be able to code a nifty package like PHPList, or at least to be able to start contributing as a developer to all of these places.

The irony is, I like the places I frequent to stay static forever, and the places I create to change every second of every day.

What I like Hmmm... I'm not the person to ask. I like it. What I like most is that I know where everything is at and I can find all the info I need fast. More of a reflex and less of a thought. Commentary The less change the better. Knowing where everything is is what's helping me along the road of going from a couple of basic accounts to a basic reseller package. Every time I come to the forums, which is more often than I have anything to say, I drop in and check out the sales packages and read up on the dedicated server info, which brings me into the forum to read more and ask less questions while I figure things out for myself as much as possible. Being familiar with where everything is at is the greatest strength of the site for me. Right now I'm booking the Latin Billboard Awards in Miami, but every second I have time to breathe I'm learning more about programming. Today my fashion scene skills are a lot better than my design and programming skills, but with TCH and great open-source resources I'm growing. I could have paid to have a site designed for me a long time ago, but I'm the stubborn type who likes to know how everything works. That's where the joy is in it for me.

An hour later, that makes so much sense... thinking how a spider works, crawling through the directory. As a new programmer and designer with so much on my mind getting my pages up as fast as possible it's easy to not see the forest for the trees.

Thanks! That saved me a world of wonder and missteps...

I have a site with 6 php includes. header,footer,right menu, left menu, sales menu, content. Sometimes more for a special menu. Do I need a robots.txt in every .php include for it to be effective? I don't necessarily want the robot crawling all of my headers if my bandwidth is suffering from anything unecessary. I'm doing a php include of a robots.txt file so that way I can universally update it across the platform. Yeah, maybe nobody should have clued me in on the basics of php. Even though I haven't started programming as a programmer would, the doors have been opened and I'm using this knowledge everyday. Is 6 php includes for a robots.txt file in every include overkill, or smart use? I understand it's open to interpretation and I highly value your opinions. If anyone else is doing something similar, it would be fun to hear what you're up to;definitely participate.

I'm a little late to the party, but here's my contribution. Icons for mobile devices. I also recommend the W3C Schools and their articles about programming for mobile devices.

I have a web page with a php include for the header, another for the footer, the right menu, left menu and a sales banner. How many CSS links do I need really? Right now the page is all white, but I want the flexibility to change it in the future. Maybe I have a fancy logo made in March and want an orange background. So the question is, do I need a CSS link in all of the php include files that are being called including my header, footer, menus, etc. Wouldn't those other php files show as a white background when I change the header's CSS? Is there a best way to make it universal and life easier (css control); something that you are using? My theory is to create css.php and have an include inside an include. My css.php file will control all of the other .php files style sheets. Do I have a winner? Or do you see a pitfall with load time or something else I'm missing? I'm going ahead right now, but jump in if you see a better way.

Is it possible for us to send gifts to the TCH offices in December or really anytime of the year for either the office in general or specific people from tech support? The least any business owner could do who has been helped time and again is send a card to the offices when you're thinking back on things to be thankful for during the past year. Either way, I'm showing my gratitude and appreciation right now for everyone here and I sincerely do thank you! Of course things like food wouldn't go over well, but really anything sensible and tangible. Is it okay to do or discouraged? Here's what I wrote in another topic. Thanks again! Are we allowed to send gifts to the TCH offices on anyones behalf? I'll open a new topic on it. Between W3 Schools and TCH I'm learning a lot and using a lot of what I learn. I'm going to write something in the open topics about it to see if it's allowed and if anyone has or does do it. Especially all of the business owners at Christmas. Even if products don't fit, you guys are on the top of my list of thank you's and people to be thankful for in my year.

Thanks again! Are we allowed to send gifts to the TCH offices on anyones behalf? I'll open a new topic on it. Between W3 Schools and TCH I'm learning a lot and using a lot of what I learn. I'm going to write something in the open topics about it to see if it's allowed and if anyone has or does do it. Especially all of the business owners at Christmas. Even if products don't fit, you guys are on the top of my list of thank you's and people to be thankful for in my year.

Tech support, a friendly and positive atmosphere and a great forum to learn how to grow your technical skills. Let's face it, not having a web host is like not having a phone number. Everyone needs a web address in the world of today. If not, you are missing out on a lot of what life has to offer. If you're a successful and happy person, you might have 5 or 10 domain names. I'm intellectual at heart, but TCH has helped to make me a man of action! Thanks for making my life better.

When did the light come on for you? The day you said, I can't believe I've been posting html pages, everything has to be php. Do you use php on all of your sites, or html? I learned how to use the php include function this week, and now I need to go change all of my web pages from html to php, and I don't know how I'd get by without this stuff. Are most of your pages php now; something you'd like to learn or is it still a mystery. Has php changed your life?

I created sub-domains and inserted periods in them between words in the sub-domain name. Cpanel allowed me to create them fine. The web address appears when entered into a browser and the site displays perfectly. Cpanel returns my sub-domain as being created just fine upon creation. Everything is great! Well... is it really? I noticed a display message that had said to not create a sub-domain with a period. Is there an unseen problem with creating a domain like this? Will it impact my search results in Google? I've seen other operations with periods seperating sub-domains and I am wondering if I'm facing an unanticipated situation here or if I should go ahead since it's working great. Thank you for listening.

I see the Head Gurus phone number in my future. I've been coding all night with my new skills learned here. That sounds like it's a fantastic deal. Still working my way up from starterhosting and the Front Page trenches, but thanks to everyone here my skill set is growing by the day.

My Other PHP Tutorial is HERE.

A Simple PHP Web Template by David Alderson This is to show you how easy it is to create a PHP enabled web site. I'm including the basic html and php code here. Plus I'm sharing my file structure for the web site I created this past hour. Features A header, a footer, a menu on the left and one on the right with content floating in the middle. There's also a sub-header I call a sales_menu because I'm using it for rotating sales banners on a daily or weekly basis. Update 1,000's of web pages at once, by dragging and dropping a single file! The Code <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> <title>Web Site Title</title> </head> <body> <?php include 'header.php'; ?> <?php include 'sales_menu.php'; ?> <div align="center"> <center> <table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse" bordercolor="#FFFFFF" width="85%" id="AutoNumber1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td width="20%"><?php include 'left_menu.php'; ?></td> <td width="53%"> <p align="left" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">content</td> <td width="27%"><?php include 'right_menu.php'; ?></td> </tr> </table> </center> </div> <?php include 'footer.php'; ?> </body> </html> Where it says CONTENT - You place your page content. The rest is calling upon php files to create your header, footer and left and right sided menu's, similar to those on my site, found here. File Structure content_images footer_images header_images htm_files php_files right_images sales_images left_images This is what my file structure looks like in Front Page and what it could look like for you when you design your site. When you copy and paste your images into the folder after you've built your footer or header or menu in the htm design view, Front Page points the html code to that folder without you having to do any manual pointing yourself. It's neatly tucked away, so that way you drag and drop your entire folder in Coffee Cup Free FTP or a similar program, having all your images neatly organized for each php file. HTM and PHP Files I have created a folder for htm files and php files. I do all of my editing in the htm view and then I copy the page into my php folder and change the htm extension to .php This allows me to click on the htm file in Front Page and have it automatically pop up in design view for editing. If you click on a php file, it opens a notepad style view for editing, rather than a Front Page design view, which I like. My PHP Files As noted above in the code. header sales_menu left_menu right_menu footer The Code <?php include 'header.php'; ?> Alter as needed. header.php footer.php left_menu.php right_menu.php sales_menu.php Clean Design I find this method great for clean design. BETA Testing and Added Benefits What's great about this method of using PHP files is that I'm able to beta test a web site. I can create a sub-domain on my account and create active hyperlinks that work and publish the web. I'm working on something right now that I'd like to purchase some server space and a domain name for. This way I can get everything up and running and tested on a locked sub-domain on my existing account. Rather than having to edit hundreds and maybe thousands of hyperlinks to point to the actual registered address, all I have to do now is change the links in the .htm footer, header, right_menu, left_menu and sales_menu. Copy them to my php folder in Front page and change the extension to .php and upload them to the server. Now I've updated literally hundreds or possibly thousands of hyperlinks, and I can see my site live as it would be working tonight! On Front Page I have Dreamweaver MX and the latest Front Page, but I prefer Front Page. Many people would argue Dreamweaver is a far superior program, but I preferred my latest greatest Front Page to Dreamweaver CS3 because I know so many of the hot keys and can create without letting my hands leave the keyboard, or with having my left hand always on the keys and my right hand always on the mouse for long periods of time. For me, learning Dreamweaver MX is something I'm doing slowly, but Front Page is definitely my program, and now that I tonight learned how to create with basic PHP, you have no idea. I can apparently barely wait to get going, since I was ready for bed and 2 hours later had a new web site and a tutorial up and running. Conclusions I now have IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino all on my system, and it's amazing how different my pages look on each different browser. That's where I'm headed next. Creating flexible pages that look great on as many browsers as possible. My site is supposed to float on a white background, but I've noticed how many different browsers show my automatic frame colors in black, when they should be in white, so I'm learning every hour of every day. I hope this tutorial takes some of the intimidation out of PHP and puts the power in your hands immediately to start using it in your web sites today. see my other php tutorial here. php in 5 minutes or less.

Last Words I wish I would have had this tutorial boiled down this easy for me to get started. I did the hello world tutorial which is good and I tried several other lessons. Had anyone told me all I had to do was put that snippet into my html and that would insert the contents of my page wherever that code is, I would have been up and running in 5 minutes. I give credit to this tutorial here, which got me to see the light quickly. Applications So let's say I want to add flash to my menu on my web site on the left side. Well, now instead of making a change and copying and pasting updates of code in each individual web page I instead change my left_menu.php file and load it onto the server, and each of my pages that has the php code in the left table instead of a conglomeration of html and image codes is automatically updated with my php file contents. How cool and easy is that! Do it for a footer, a header, an anything really! That little code along with your contents creates all of your pages. Alter your footer.php, header.php or anything.php file and load it to the server, and anywhere that code appears, changes automatically take place. So cool. Conclusions This is the chase I always wanted to cut to as a business owner when it came to php, so I hope this helps other owners and those who want to have nice things in life by learning more about coding. Be it a personal page that looks nice, or their own mini-empire. Thanks Thanks to everyone here who has taught me, I wanted to take 10 minutes tonight to give something back that might help out someone who's learning. Especially thanking Thomas and Bruce and Tina directly again, and so many others including the head guru who I'm learning from by browsing through the forums about every day I was on the CPanel and Web Host Manager site tonight using the demo versions, and reading about the reseller packages here; who knows what comes next!

PHP Made Easy by David Alderson This is the one piece of code you need if you are new to PHP. <?php include 'footer.php'; ?> That's it! 1. Insert this in your html. 2. Create a file in Front Page or Dreamweaver and name it footer.php 3. No matter how many pages you have this code on, when you update your footer.php file any page with this code will auto-update when your footer.php is loaded on the server with the changes you've made as long as your web page ends with .php Easy. Make one for a header (header.php). Make one for a right side menu and put it in a table (right_menu.php). Make one for a left side menu, etc. Throw away all of your .php tutorials, this piece of code is all you need to get started.

Thank you again. Somehow I downloaded the zip onto the server instead of mailing it to myself. The rest of the space I used before thinking to mail it (the zip) directly to my gmail account. All part of the learning, but it's been going great.

I have a question . I noticed my disk space went from 383.37mb to 452.98mb after running some of the commands. I'm wondering what I can do to limit the disk space used besides reducing the nightly backup to a weekly backup? I didn't choose to save a copy in the php program, but it seems as if maybe there's a copy being saved. I was thinking that I could go into the file manager and delete whatever was happening to regain my space. Do you happen to know of any common errors that could be causing this? I have the job forwarded directly to a gmail account and it bypasses 'my email' and all forwarding here at TCH. Thanks. Otherwise, everything is great!

For the love of all things PHP and Bruce. I had somewhat given up. Sitting here listing to a song from the 80's a friend is playing on her radio station since she's always asking what I'd like played. Tinkering with a message from Facebook a friend in Japan by way of BC left me. Well... I changed one little command in your file Bruce, and as I looked in my gmail not expecting to see anything other than another error message. There's my backup in full. You guys really are the best!!! I posted my first classified for designing web pages earlier in Feb and Total Choice is the host I'm recommending to everyone. I have some decent basic html skills and some illustrator and photoshop skills, with a little php, mysql and java we'll see what I'm doing in the future weeks and months. There's no telling with the support I've received. Thanks for everything! I'll have to see how I made it work in the morning and give it another go and test uploading the backup. Can't thank you all enough... Bruce, Thomas and Tina and everyone who has helped me learn so much this past month. I'm listening to the Bee Gee's and I'm not stopping here. Thanks again. It truly can't be said enough here. John Lennon plays us out... 'Imagine all the people, living for today...'

Here's the message that came from Tina (TCH). It turns out that everything is configured fine, and I did a line-by-line reading of the file for syntax. What's happening is that the source file I copied had incorrect syntax in it. Tina was able to spot it easily, for me it's understanding a new language that's coming to me through use. I'm new to php and I was able to check for ; close commands and =$variables and my own inputs thanks to Thomas earlier this month, but when it came to new syntax I've never seen before I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at and therein was what has been preventing the cron job from running smoothly. If anyone wouldn't mind pasting a proven working copy of the php file here, that would be awesome. Either way, I'm correcting the syntax the best I can spot the errors, and if I reach my destination before a copy is up here, I'll either paste it into the forum or host it on my server.

Here's where I am. <br /> <b>Warning</b>: Unexpected character in input: '\' (ASCII=92) state=1 in <b>/home/username/dbsender/friends/friendsbackup.php</b> on line <b>3</b><br /> <br /> <b>Parse error</b>: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in <b>/home/username/dbsender/friends/friendsbackup.php</b> on line <b>3</b><br /> my actual username has been substituted with 'username' The Cron Daemon is doing its job. I used the script highlighted above in the link I provided, the one in the TCH tutorial is 404. Here's the mail headline that gets mailed to me: Cron <username@serverxxx> /usr/bin/php -q /home/username/dbsender/friends/friendsbackup.php username and server number have been substituted. Permissions on dbsender and friends directories are 770. any hints are appreciated. I try to make it work everyday and I've been learning something new everyday this week. This is one I'm getting working. Thanks so much for all of the wonderful help and support, I'm doing things I never dreamed I'd be able to do, but always wanted to do.

Thanks. In the tutorial the link to dbsender.php is no longer valid. Here's a copy of the script.