Pulling Variables From Database

Recently I was working with a database and needed a way to have variables on each page but each page needed different content. i know this can be done with templating but I didn't want to have to import a big templating software for this one thing. I did a few searches online and after a while of searching saw mention of PhP's eval function.

It was a bit tricky to get working but here is the result:

eval("\$string = \"$string\";");
echo $string;

$string is the result from the database and can contain a string like "we have $variable1 for your $variable2!". The eval function takes car of parsing the PhP variable...very useful.

Thought this might be useful to anyone caring to read =)

Gmail's New Themes

So I originally heard about the new themes for Gmail and thought well that's pretty cool that they,re finally doing that. But I decided to check it out and the last theme caught my eye - Terminal. A little something every programmer can appreciate...



check it out by going to Gmail Themes and logging to your gmail account

Site Keyword Crawler

Recently I have been interested in PhP array functions and Regular Expressions (abbreviated as RegExp). I have found it is very easy to find the major keywords that are inside a string of text using the following code:

function getKeyWords($content){
 $tokens=explode(" ", $content);
 $keywords=array("num_words"=>1);
 foreach ($tokens as $word){
  if (!array_key_exists($word, $keywords)){
   //echo "word not found! $word
";
   $keywords[$word]=1;
  }else 
   $keywords[$word]++;
  $keywords['num_words']++;
 }
 return $keywords;
}

Basically it breaks apart the content into an array of tokens and checks for duplicates. As it stands this will grab anything with a space between as a token so things like 'alt="text' will be tagged as a token. Some modifications are needed for this to work on an HTML document like some fancy reg exp searches =). I will keep posting with any updates to this function...

Using functions in form file

So I recently ran into the problem of trying to grab $_REQUEST variables from a page and use them in a function on the same page. My error was Fatal error: Call to undefined function myFunction...

The structure of my code was check if the request had been submitted and perform page logic, otherwise display the form. The apparent problem was that my function was inside the page logic after the if statement checked for the request. Because it was after the if statement it never got parsed ahead of time and therefore never really existed before the call was made.

To fix the problem I simply moved my function to the top of my pHp code (before the if statement) and everything works fine.

Party Fun 411 - a party directory

My most recent project at SEO Webworks is Party Fun 411. Party Fun 411 is a party directory where you can find any kind of service you would need for any city or state in the US. Only the cities that have vendors listed though will show up so you don't waste your time looking through empty directories. I discovered vendors for types of companies I didn't even know existed such as chocolate fountains. Did you know there are vendors out there that let you rent them? I didn't. You can also find any of your normal party services such as Limousines or "Party Buses" and Planners for things like weddings or even corporate events.

Party Fun also helps out the small vendor companies that offer party services because it allows them to build PR (Google's page ranking system). Our site helps focus keywords such as wedding planning to vendors for wedding planning so even the little guys have a chance at being found.

I think that Party Fun 411 has a lot of potential to grow and be that much more valuable to its customers and vendors.

Creating static pages from a database

For my most recent project I will be creating a sign-up sheet that will generate static pages when the information is entered. The reason the pages will be static is so they can be crawled by search engine spiders. A spider cannot read dynamically created pages because it only looks at what is stored on the server and that would be the php script which is not friendly at all to them. The only block of information that I will not have to store in the database is the text block because it will only be written out to the pages for that particular user. The rest of the information will have to be called from other pages.

Creating the page for the vendor is easy (if you've used xtemplates before). Its just a matter using xtemplate function xtpl->assign() to replace the text block and other info where it is needed.

The first mildly challenging aspect I encountered was the multiple select list where the user can choose multiple options with ctrl-click as so:
Select an optionoption1option2option3


This data has to be stored somewhere and the most difficult part was getting the array to pass to the php script. In my script I had:

if(isset($cities)){
  foreach($cities as $value){
   $query="INSERT IGNORE INTO `***` (`user`, `cities`) VALUES ('".$user_name."', '".$value."');";
   mysql_query($query) or die('Failed to update user to cities: '.mysql_error());
  }
 }

< br />
Which I was sure would work but I kept getting an error on my foreach statement. After some research on html forms I found that the value to be passed as an array to a script had to be defined as name="my_name[]". Html needs the [] to show the script that it is an array otherwise it will just pass the first value. Obviously a foreach() statement won't work on an non-array type so this is why that code was breaking.

The next bigger challenge I have is to create site maps to all of these pages being created and also create links on the bottom of the user's page to some pages from other users, based on group, as kind of a minimap. Again all my pages have to be static so php cannot reside on the page and call the database. I looked into the Apache server mod_rewrites and there is no way to create a static page with php on it. My first idea was to write a script to parse the php pages using the ob_start() function which will store all proceeding information on an internal buffer which is sent to the browser's buffer on ob_end_flush(). This buffered content (which will now be parsed by the browser) can be stored in any string. I was then going to take this content and write it to a new .html file under the same name. This takes a lot of time because of the amount of pages being created and buffered and space because I would have to keep the .php file in the event the database was updated I would have to update the .html.

But then I got an idea which was much simpler and straight forward and would save all the extra work from my previous idea. My idea is to not even put the php on the page in the first place. I can just use the xtpl->assign('var', 'content') function here as well and put the php code in the content as xtpl->assign('var', 'php_code'). The browser will parse the php code before it gets sent to the xtpl function saving me a lot of work. The only thing I need to do now is to make my code more modular so I can write a script to update the pages using this philosophy every so often for when the database is updated.

So since I can't do php in a comment...
I think that the bitwise or was probably the cause of the problem. I actually didn't notice until you pointed it out. But I just ended up re-doing the database (basically copy and paste) so I could create this much nicer query:

$query = "select * from Artists"
$result = mysql_query($query)
if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 0){
echo 'nothing here...'
}
else{
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)){
echo ""
$out = ""
echo $out
echo $row['state']
echo ""

$out = ""
echo $out
echo $row['city']
echo ""

$out = ""
echo $out
echo $row['venue']
echo "
"
}
}
This was just to get it to work so I could display something. When I'n not working on my new project i will try to work out the original setup (which I still kept incase). As it is right now it is very difficult to update the database because the amount of data for each column is different so there are a lot of blank rows. This just makes messy MySQL updates when trying to find the first blank row which isn't very efficient since I want to be able to upload multiple rows at a time.

Multiple MySQL Queries in PhP

The problem with using multiple queries from multiple tables is that the MYSQL_ASSOC or MYSQL_NUM both only seem to work on the latest query even if the queries and results are stored under different variables. Here is the code:
echo '

';
   require ('dbconnect.inc');
   $query_state = "select state from States;";
   $result_state = mysql_query($query_state);
   $query_city = "select city from Cities;";
   $result_city = mysql_query($query_city);
   $query_venue = "select venue from Venues;";
   $result_venue = mysql_query($query_venue);
   
   if (mysql_num_rows($result_state) == 0 | mysql_num_rows($result_city) == 0 | mysql_num_rows($result_venue) == 0){
    echo 'nothing here...';
   }
   else{
    while ($row1 = mysql_fetch_array($result_state, MYSQL_ASSOC) | $row2 = mysql_fetch_array($result_city, MYSQL_ASSOC) | $row3 = mysql_fetch_array($result_venue, MYSQL_ASSOC)){
     echo "";
     $out = "";
     echo $out;
     echo $row1['state'];
     echo "";
    
     $out = "";
     echo $out;
     echo $row2['city'];
     echo "";
     
     $out = "";
     echo $out;
     echo $row3['venue'];
     echo "
     ";
    }
   }
echo '

';
?>
And all that appears is the last column. The tags are being read correctly because the result remains in the correct column it just doesn't seem to read the first two queries.
My solution for now is just to move the tables into one table which isn't most efficient for the database end but I think that can be sacrificed for now for PhP efficiency.

Dynamically Creating Pages

So here's a funny story...recently I was trying to use PhP inside a page I have created dynamically. I was just using simple echo statements to try to output HTML to the page. Seems simple right? For some reason I couldn't figure out it just wasn't working. So I did a lot of research on single quotes and double quotes and PhP functions such as htmlspechialchars() and addslashes(). None of those worked. Then I decided to look at the function that was creating the page. Turns out it was creating a .HTML page and not a .php page so it could not read the PhP. I felt foolish after that. Anyway I learned some things I would have to deal with later so it wasn't a complete waste of time.