The basic idea of each social link community is that people share their discovered links with others via the Internet. Actually it’s only allowed to send those links to your social community friends. Having a lot of friends with the same interest like yourself is something very valuable to generate a lot of traffic to your website or weblog. We all know that both communities digg.com and StumbleUpon are good for big traffic if some story became hot in these communities. A listing on the digg.com main page is good for many 10K of visitors. Let’s have a look on the link sharing features which both communities provide:

StumbleUpon (SU toolbar fun)

Each SU member can add friends while stumbling other member pages. Members of stumbleupon use a browser toolbar for voting and navigation (stumbling), will say you need to send links to your friends via this toolbar. Your friends will notice your “shout” because of some tiny red number in their SU toolbar. After they stumbled your page they see your message and it possible to send some message back. If you have some active SU friends and they like what you send them via the toolbar it’s possible that this “Stumble” becomes hot and the stumbled page becomes a hot item and is presented more often to other stumblers. Read the rest of this entry »

FTP hosting is often much cheaper than regular web hosting. The upload with an ftp client is for sure the most common way, but could be a problem for people behind a firewall or without enough rights (capabilities) to install a FTP client. For those a upload via a web form is the best solution.

Upload limitations by your web server

The default value for file uploads within PHP is 2MB, if you need to upload bigger files you need to change your PHP configuration or need to create a .htaccess file with this code to upload files of max. 16MB:

php_value upload_max_filesize 16M
php_value post_max_size 20M

The value for the post_max_size is larger than the value for the upload_max_size because we want to be able to upload more than just a file (also other data via text fields or text areas). The .htaccess file needs to be in the same directory than your upload script.

Using cURL for file transmissions

cURL is a great library for file transmissions via different types of protocols. The library supports the transport via POST, GET, FTP upload and much more. cURL is also able to authenticate on the target server or website.

In this tutorial we want to upload a file to some (password protected) remote FTP server via a web form. Read the rest of this entry »

Often people doesn’t like to use Flash websites because Google can’t “read” the text inside a flash movie. In the past people used a mirror HTML version to get in the SERP’s of Google and other search engines.

These days I read about some nice project the SWFObject a nice JavaScript solution that enables Flash user to detect the Flash plug-in for each browser. Actually there is no more OBJECT, PARAM or EMBED element in the HTML code required because this is done by the SWFObject. Using this object the security issue that comes with Internet Explorer belongs to the present (people don’t need to click twice to access a Flash element). How is this working? This is the code you need to add a Flash movie to you web page? Read the rest of this entry »

For a future project I needed these days some easy to use zip or gzip class to create a zip file from files / folders inside a specified directory. A short search on Google has lead me to the Create ZIP File PHP class from Rochak Chauhan. I tested two other scripts before and must say that this script works great for single files if you add them manually.

To compress a whole directory with an unknown number of files into one zip file I created some class extension to get this job done.
I used some directory functions (opendir, readdir) to get all the files from the specified directory. Inside each directory there are files and “real directories” and directory locations. We need only the real directories. We test each value with “is_file”, “is_dir” and we filter off the directory directions (”.” and “..”). After the “file” is identified, the files content is added to the “addFile” object and for other directories the method “get_file_from_folder” is called again. Read the rest of this entry »