QR codes (quick response) codes are quite the hype these days. QR codes are like bar codes (they are also known as 2D bar codes) but unlike their line-y little brothers they can store a lot more information. A very popular application is to use it for a URL- which is the most relevant to this website and what I will continue to discuss.

Search Engine Optimization is a hot topic for somebody who's just launched a web based business and wants to get "on top" of Google's search results. There are a couple of steps which you should take during the coding of your website and a couple simple steps you can do after your website is "done" (a website is never "done" without quotation marks).

This guide is meant for absolute beginners to PHP; someone who's already familiar with regular HTML and CSS, and is willing to take his websites to the next level. PHP is server-side scripting which means that the code is executed at the server before it reaches a browser. This also means that our first step will be setting up a type of server on your home PC.

It seems the forums here at Wgg don’t get a lot of screen-time, so I’ve decided to expand on a long lost forum topic to compare two alternatives to regular old MySQL database accessing in PHP. I will be looking at MySQLi, where the ‘i’ stands for improved, and SQLite, where the ‘ite’ stands for light.

Even after a few years of experience, I am still discovering more hidden powers in PHP every once in a while. If you have a look at some of my older posts, you’ll see a sort of learning curve happening. Currently I’m in the process of mastering a more OO approach, even if it’s just the database handling. There are, however, a few things I would like to share with you, things you might have been doing the long way before, and now find out that those 15 lines of code can easily be just 3 lines.

Google are taking on the world - the beta of Google Chrome (their new web browser) has been released. Although not yet ready for Apples or Penguins it can be tested on Windows machines.
So what's the verdict?

If you’re making your own website, and you long for that little orange icon to light up when visitors come to your site, the way it lights up on other websites, ones that have RSS feeds, then search no more, because I’ll show you how.

AJAX is one of the newer buzz words floating around these days and sites with fancy AJAX scripts for you to cut and paste are springing up all the time. So what are the basics of AJAX? How does it work? And is it easy to write your own simple AJAX scripts?
Follow this short AJAX guide and with nothing more than a text editor and a browser you'll grasp the basics in no time.

In Part 2. of this AJAX guide we create a very simple XML text file and run through the steps to get the data to update into a web page without refreshing the page.

Using responseXML and the DOM instead of responseText
So far we have been looking at AJAX using an XML file, however we have really only been treating the XML file as any other text file. This could have been a .txt .htm or some text generated by a server side scripting engine (PHP, ASP etc.)