Today I am going to talk about Search Engine Friendly URLs. You may not have taken them into consideration, but you should if you want good search engine rankings.

You’ve probably seen websites that have some crazily long website address, for example:
http://store.britannica.com/jump.jsp?itemType=CATEGORY&itemID=7&iMainCat=7&iSubCat=7

Not only does it make it hard for you to remember that long address, all those variables in the URL hurt the ranking of the site.

Some search engines simply get confused with the variables, but the good engines can still crawl them. However, when you use variables a couple things can happen:

1. Google states that it will crawl dynamic pages slower
2. The variables could be in a different order, creating a duplicate page with different url
3. Users might link to the site, leaving out a variable, or in a different order
4. The variables don’t describe the page.. iMainCat=7 is what category??

With that in mind, it is very important to make your URLs search engine friendly. Here are some basic tips for your URLs:

1. Use category text, not category numerical ids
2. Use dashes (-), not spaces
3. Use only alpha-numeric characters, thats a-z, 0-9
4. Use keywords in your URL
5. Use directories sparingly, I wouldn’t go over 5 deep

If you use software like a forum or blog, chances are the software supports search engine friendly urls if you have access to htaccess and mod re-write. For instance, WordPress can make these nice blog urls with it, or you can have index.php?id=# – The sooner you use search engine friendly urls, the better!

If you’ve ever wanted your site to have something like a lead capture page, a members area, or some other kind of page that requires interaction from the user, than Custom PHP Programming may be for you!

Custom PHP programming can also include service kind of sites. For instance, if you ever wanted your own Traffic Exchange, Tracker Site, and any other kind of service that users sign up for. Most sites that are services include some kind of free plan, and then an upgraded paid plan with more features.

So if you have some brilliant idea, how do you know it is worth hiring a PHP programmer? Below I’ll go over some things to consider:

Consider your budget
If you have less than $500, then I wouldn’t suggest hiring a programmer to create a full blown website. They can take quite alot of time, and you don’t want to find yourself having to cut corners! If, however, its just a modification or addition to your existing site, than having less than $500 wouldn’t be bad.

Consider your market
How big is it? Is it a unique market? Are there any sites that currently offer what your bright idea is? Try doing some real research on this. You don’t want to jump into a market that already has large companies spending tons of money on their sites that people already love. It would take a whole lot to compete with them.

Consider your target audience
If your target audience is teenagers, you’ll be in for some trouble. Rarely do teenagers have money to spend, and even if they do – most either aren’t willing to spend it online, or aren’t capable of it. The younger your audience is, the harder it’ll be to get them to spend (unless you target their parents). Of course, there are exceptions to this.. It’s just alot harder.

After you’ve considered those three things, and you REALLY think you have a GOOD IDEA, then you’ll want to start rolling it into action. Remember, you’ve got to really think this through, and do alot more planning than what I’m telling you here. I’m no legal expert, and their are tons of laws that are unique to certain types of businesses, so you’ll need to do some consulting on that too. Below I’ll go over what you need to do when hiring a PHP programmer.

Review their experience
If you hire someone with little experience, they’ll likely take longer to create what it is you are looking for. For instance, I’ve built dozens of traffic exchanges – I already know exactly what it takes to make one tick, I could build one much faster than someone who doesn’t. You could hire someone to build you a traffic exchange, and have to describe anti-cheating technologies, most of which you don’t even see while surfing an exchange yourself.

If a programmer doesn’t have a website with their portfolio, areas of expertise, etc – ask them for it. Just because they don’t have it on a website doesn’t mean they don’t have any, as I’ve gotten so busy that I haven’t had time to update my own sites. But if they are reluctant to give you any past experience, go with someone else.

Get an estimate
If you feel this person can do your project, try getting an estimate. From experience, I know it is hard to give estimates. However, I can generally tell if a project is going to take a while or be quick. I’ll also tell you if it just won’t work, or if I don’t think the idea is a good one, or if I think the project is over my abilities (or at least what parts are). Find out how much they charge per hour, if there is a minimum amount per project, and see if they can give you an estimate in hours.

Just remember, it is an estimate and it can be much quicker or much longer than expected. I try to overestimate my projects to have a happy client. Also remember, if you want something changed or added after the project is complete – those changes could require big changes in the backend. If you have to, make any changes as early as possible – it’ll save you money!

Hire Me!
Well I’ve written alot, and I’m running out of writing juice. But of course if you’d like to hire me, you can find more information about me at Linden Software. I’ve also written alot of information at CLiX Network. Many clients have read what I wrote there, and hired me because they could see first hand what I know.

First we need to breifly go over how the date function works. It is fairly straightforward:

string date ( string format [, int timestamp] )

You simply pass a string containing the date format, and a timestamp if you don’t want to use the current time. Something to note: Any character that isn’t recognized by the date function will be displayed as is.

With the individual characters you can create full formats. Below are the formats that I use most frequently:

For a full list of all the recognized characters visit the PHP: date – Manual. This list is only a list of the characters I use frequently myself.

In my last article I showed you how to Password Protect with htaccess and htpasswd, and how to use PHP to add to your htpasswd file. In this article, I’ll show you how to use HTTP authentication, just like using htaccess, but this time you’ll be able to verify the login against a database.

So why would you want to do it this way? Well using htpasswd files to store logins can be quick and easy for a small number of logins, but if you get over 100 then things will begin to slow down. The way apache checks the file is by starting from the beginning, and checking against each line. So that means if the username and password they entered was invalid, it would go through ALL 100 lines. AND on top of that, it checks every time they access a page.

The Code

<?php
  if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
   header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
   header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
   echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
   exit;
  } else {
   echo "<p>Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.</p>";
   echo "<p>You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.</p>";
  }
?>

The Explaination
Lines 2-6: This simply sends out the headers to make that login prompt appear if they aren’t logged in.

Lines 8-9: This outputs the login they used. Note that in a real site you would check the login against a database of some sort.

Quick Tip
Once the user has been verified, you could set some kind of session up and then check the session information each page view instead of re-checking the database every time.

Learning how to use Password Protection with htaccess and htpasswd files can make it very easy to protect a large website, without modifying anything or playing with sessions. In this tutorial I’ll show you just how to do that, and how to easily add users to the htpasswd file.

htaccess

AuthName "Restricted Area" 
AuthType Basic 
AuthUserFile /home/username/hiddenfiles/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null 
require valid-user

This example .htaccess file should be placed within the folder you want protected. Notice the AuthUserFile – This should be the full path to your .htpasswd file, and it should be below your public_html folder so users cannot view it.

htpasswd Script

<?
$cryptedpw = crypt($password, substr(rand(), 0, 2));

$fp = fopen("/home/username/hiddenfiles/.htpasswd","a");
fwrite($fp, "$username:$cryptedpw\n");
fclose($fp);
?>

This script is pretty simple – it is just appending “username:encryptedpassword” to the .htpasswd file. Just remember to have the path the same as in the htaccess file, so it adds the users to the correct one.

To encrypt the password we just pass it through PHP’s crypt function, with a random 2 digit salt.