PHP Array Caching with PEAR Cache Lite

In previous posts full page, block level caching with pear cache lite have been discussed. Full page level caching is fine under a lot of conditions. However, sometimes it is desirable to cache the contents of an array to a file. PEAR Cache Lite makes this very easy.

The array used in the following example is for illustration only and very basic. On a real site the array may be the result of several database queries, or even a recursive function to display the full category structure on a website E.g. something a lot more database intensive and costly than a simple array!

The setup using PEAR Cache Lite is exactly the same, the only difference is within the constructor. There is an option called ‘automaticSerialization’ (set to false by default) that enables the caching of none string data E.g. arrays. It is possible to achieve what following by using PHP’s serialize and unserialze functions, but it’s preferable and neater to use what functionality the author of the PEAR Cache Lite class has provided. The code is very simple.

Firstly, include the PEAR Cache Lite class and pass the associative array of options (including the automaticSerialization key) to the class constructor (line highlighted):

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Appreciating Your Chosen Web Host

Sometimes, you have small experiences that really make you appreciate your chosen web host. They leave you glad you spent the time doing your homework, testing out their support, features and generally ensuring everything is easy as possible with them. If it isn’t easy, then your job will be made all that much harder, unnecessarily.

I experienced such a feeling last week with a client who wanted to use their own web hosting. I had updated a small website to include a blog and gallery, both updateable by the client. This wouldn’t usually be an issue at all if using my own hosting – simply upload the files, add in my custom htaccess file for some mod rewriting goodness and away we go.

However, the host in question was 1and1.co.uk. Now, I’ve read some absolute horror stories about this company in the past – all such experiences seem very typical of a very large company, with their support teams based offshore.

So, back onto uploading the updated site in question. I had expressed initial concerns about the clients current 1and1 hosting package, noting that they’d most likely need to upgrade with 1and1, even though they were on an intermediate hosting package entitled the “1and1 Standard package”. I had also personally been forced to use their support about a year ago, which was hard work to say the least. Moving forward, I carried on and uploaded the site to 1and1’s servers and then visited site. Instant internal server error 500. Straight away I knew this was the hosting as I had previously given the client a link to a staging area on my preferred web host, that worked flawlessly. I’m aware 1and1 have some restrictive hosting on their basic packages (which seems to be inherant of such a large company, with thousands of customers in my experience), so I immediately headed towards to the .htaccess file (it’s essentially a variation of the HTML5 Bolierplate template with some of my own magic included, nothing out of the ordinary though) and renamed the htaccess file. Whallah – the site loaded, thus isolating the issue straight away. Great, I can inform 1and1 and find out what htaccess directives are allowed, it should be a run of the mill support request for any support department.

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SEO Indexing Services and Why You Don’t Need Them

SEO indexing is the idea of getting a new site indexed, or included within Google as quickly as possible. However, there are companies who prey on people not in the know, and sell seo indexing as a much bigger service. In reality getting your site indexed is something you can do yourself, if you have a spare 15 minutes. Worse still, some companies are changing hundreds of pounds for seo indexing – it makes my eyes water.

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Enchaning an Invoicing System for Reporting

At the start of the year I wrote a custom invoicing system for a client, using PHP and Smarty (hope to convert to use Twig at some point). The client has since come back to me to built in extra functionality – namely a reporting section. I thought I’d share my solution to the issue I was faced with.

The client required some fairly involved reporting facilities, here is a sample of some of the requirements from the client:

  • Aggregated report, split between two dates of our choosing, with totals split by either month, day or week (we want to choose)
  • A list of invoices for a day of our choosing with aggregated totals of for the day selected
  • Annual invoicing report – we want to show a summary of the total for the items sold, the total vat charged and summaries for average invoice values
  • Invoices totals grouped by customer

There were several more, but they were all similar to the above.

Firstly, I’ll explain the database setup, for the invoicing, of the current system I built. It was basically two tables – one for the invoivce header and one table for the invoices items – nothing un typical there at all.

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ECommerce Content Source Ordering for Product Detail Pages

Content source ordering or SOC (source ordered content) is the idea that content nearer the top of the raw  HTML source code has greater weight and meaning for search engines. For instance, a paragraph of text right at the top of the HTML source has more meaning than the same passage that may appear in the footer. It is very useful for those all too common generic menus (home, about, contact etc.) that has no SEO benefit at all, yet appears at the top of every page of your site. With SOC and absolute positioning of DOM elements, it is possible to position this HTML at the very bottom of the source code, thus gicing greater weight to your page content.

The latter is not a new idea by any means, but is generally considored to be a positive practice to implement on any site.

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Storing Ecommerce Order Information Correctly

Yesterday I was doing a tiny bit of web realted freelancing for a friend – simply involving doing a bulk, conditional update of his entire stock for his ecommerce website. The site itself was simple in design and used PayPal with a sprinkle of IPN. So, after a bit of MySQL magic, I updated all of his prices, for all ~700 products in one fell swoop – all good so far, easy money.

However, after an hour or so of emailing the store owner I got a very worried phone call. In short, the bulk price update to had caused all archived order invoices to become incorrect. Why – due to bad database design by the original developer, let me explain.

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CRO and SEO – The Essential Relationship

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of SEO related posts at the web design forum and have been contacted by a lot of seo agencies at work (my email may be doing the rounds). The thing that I’m most amazed by is what a narrow and ultimately incorrect, view of search engine optimisation some people and companies seem to have.

Let me elaborate.

As much as I love the web design forum, some of the advice given is frankly, awful, I can’t not post a reply. A lot of the advice given is a range of generic seo quotes that people have picked from the web. E.g. ‘use headings’, ‘have a keyword density of 4%’ and ‘get backlinks’. The majority of the advice centers around simply getting people on a website or appearing for a generic, competitive term. Compare the latter to SEO’s calling me up at work (and I quote) – “there are 9,000 people searching for xxxxx every month, imagine having 9,000 more people on your site every month”.

All this is fine in theory. However, say you do manage to appear for a generic competitive term or get 9,000 new people on your site – what then. There is a high likelyhood that your boucne rate (or percentage of people who leave your almost immediately) will increase a lot.

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JQuery UI Love

Recently, I’ve completed a fairly large project that involved an invoicing system and electronic time cards. As the system was based in house, I decided to make extensive use of JQuery UI. After taking some time to reflect on this I decided to show JQuery UI some love and write a short list of reasons whyit totally rocks, as it made my life as a developer a lot easier. Yes, it is overkill importing the whole Jquery UI library and using a single, none essential widget, on a one page smaller site. However, when you have a medium sized system, that requires a large range of interactions, there really isn’t anything else I’d rather use, personally.

The Range of Widgets Available

Firstly, I made use of nearly all the widgets available – this resulted in the final system being highly interactive and useable. For instance, having the ability to sort items simply via dragging and dropping when down extrememley well on the useability front with users. JQuery UI made it very easy to save these sorted positions to my database. Having to write something like this from scratch would have been impossible (for me anyway :)) and been very time consuming.The dashboard/portal area was another area, where the requyirement to personalise the location of various content boxes was made easy.

The JQuery Dialog went down a storm too on the useability front too, as people were used to nasty old default JavaScript ones – the ability to include HTML within each dialog, on the fly allowed me to achieve some pretty informative and useable diaglog.

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SEO URL Correction

The use of mod_rewrite to create SEO friendly URLs is common place now. However, if an application is not coded correctly they can have potentially negative effects.

Take the fowllowing URL, this is the URL the developer intended – the news story is fetched from the ID in the querystring:

http://www.site.com/news/23/some-breaking-story.html

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Store an AJAX Response into a Variable using JQuery

Sometimes, it’s very useful and a lot cleaner to store the result of an AJAX request into a variable – that can used in your script. For instance, say you’re using some sort of calander plugin that takes an array of exluded dates. It is highly likely that these dates will come from an database. You could echo them out manually by mixing PHP, HTML and JQuery, but this is very messy.

Instead, you could create an AJAX request that queries a database for the dates and stores them in a variable. This is fairly simply when using JQuery:

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