We'd like to talk today a bit about how you can quickly leverage the incredible power of Google Website Optimizer to roll out experiments on your data-driven website - ultimately driving your conversion rates upward. read more...

This crops up all the time. We install a particular software suite on a clients' server and when we execute the script, it spits out an error about file_get_contents not expecting some arguments. Grrr, that's our first warning sign that we're probably running PHP4 on the server. A lot of companies continue to run PHP4 and while the upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5 is generally very smooth, not all server components update as well. Thus, rather than upgrading the entire server, we provide some simple bridging functions for some of the most commonly used PHP5 functions. file_get_contents is one such function. read more...

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...