No matter how carefully you design and structure your site, visitors will sometimes request missing, moved, or non-existent pages. A well tempered 404 error page will plunge these visitors back into the flow of your site. Ian Lloyd shares strategies for crafting the perfect 404.
Topic: The Server Side
Keeping Navigation Current With PHP
Turning unordered lists into elegant navigational menus has become a new favorite pastime for many web designers. A dash of PHP can add intelligence to your CSS-styled menu.
Random Image Rotation
Readers return to sites that appear fresh and new on each visit. On a news site, magazine, or blog, stories or headlines will be updated frequently. But how can static sites keep that fresh feeling? Dan Benjamin’s free image randomizer may do the trick, and you needn’t be a programmer to install it.
Inline XML
What’s in a namespace? For one thing, the power to use multiple XML languages in a single document. Lachlan Cannon explains how inline XML can extend the capability of your sites.
Build a PHP Switcher
ALA’s open source style sheet switchers are swell as long as your visitors use compliant browsers and have JavaScript turned on. But what if they don’t? Perhaps, this: Chris Clark tells how to build a cross-browser, backward-compatible, forward-compatible, standards-compliant style sheet switcher in just five lines of code.
Manage Your Content With PHP
XHTML for structured markup. CSS for presentation. What more could you ask? How about an easy way to manage your site, using free, open-source tools? Christopher Robbins shows how to use PHP to build an intro-level, template-driven system that handles site maintenance chores and remembers your visitors’ preferences.
Win the SPAM Arms Race
SPAM is evil, moronic, and pervasive, but help is on the way. All it takes is a bit of JavaScript, a smidgen of PHP, and the ten minutes it takes to read this short, sweet tutorial. Reduce dreck mail with Dan Benjamin’s easy-to-implement address encoder.
Simple Content Management
Build a simple, expandable, client-side content management system in REBOL.
Build a Search Engine in PERL
Everything you wanted to know about using PERL to build a simple search engine for your site (but were afraid to ask).
Understanding Web Services
By promoting standards-based communication,web services might change the way we build sites.
