I couldn't quite think of an intelligible title for this article so I've decided to run with the PHP function name. The function takes a Unix timestamp as a parameter and returns a nicely formatted textual description of how long ago that was, e.g. 2 weeks ago, hence the unimaginative title, x y ago where 'x' is the number, 'y' is the unit and 'ago' is, eh, ago. You see this date difference functionality all over the web. It's particularly popular in forums where you often see headers of the form 'Posted 4 minutes ago by duke'. read more...

In this article, we're going to walk you through how you might login to a forum such as phpbb2 programatically. First off, why would you care to do such a thing? Well, out of the box forum scripts such as SMF and phpbb2 won't make much impact on their own for simply that reason, that they are out of the box and a few clicks in cPanel or Plesk can get you up and running in a couple of minutes. Ordinarily, to pack any punch (and of course to be useful and provide value to the end user), the forum script of choice will need to be installed and integrated as part of a larger container site. read more...

We encounter the need to backup the web server's contents to a remote server on nearly every project we work on. Before you head straight into creating hundreds of pages of quality content and building large data-driven websites, it's important to have a solid data backup strategy. If you do not, you will find what many of us over the years have found; that one morning you wake up, attempt to access your website and (eek!) nothing! So, you contact your hosting company and (eek!) nothing, no backups were taken in the last century and your data as you know it is lost to the ages. That is why it is so important, as a primary, not ancillary concern, of any serious developer or programmer to implement a data backup strategy without delay. read more...