These and other newly developed methods are revolutionizing the way we interact with the internet. Allowing faster page loads without much work and not too much technical needs and with the cloud going mainstream making the web experience shorter and enjoyable with less waiting of course.

CSS Sprites is also a nifty way of reducing image display time, that combines all of the images onto one page using the CSS “background-image” and “background-position” function that tells at which coordinates the already loaded image for proper display.
Continued on the next post…….

Geographical location plays an important factor when it comes to page load times and content delivery and dispersing your content over a wide swath of geographically strategic locations allows for fast page loads. It also prevents overloading of a single server that can choke and seize up in the event of huge demand.

If you have been browsing the web foir quite sometime, then you might have come across cookies which allows your browser to remember passwords and other information that may have anything to do with your actions on a particular website. These can be preferences that would allow the browser or webpage on the browser to determine your habits online allowing it to perform the requested operations faster and easier. A cookie is called a client-based information for it is stored on the client computer (yours when you browse the web) and is taken or stored intact along with all the information it contains for a specified amount of time or till you delete your browsing history and cookies. If you have come across tracking cookies, these are information that defines you to a particular web page which is called upon on your next visit. When creating cookies with your page, there are specific parameters (cookies by the way are created using user-made code in PHP) that must be remembered so as not to fill up the hard disks of your client computers as they visit your website page again and again. The function setcookie is used with the following syntax:

setcookie(var1, var2, time)

The var 1 stands for the name of the cookie you are creating, with the var 2 containing the value of the said cookie and the last parameter is the time which specifies the amount of time it takes for the function to kill (terminate/delete) the cookie. A more defined and elaborate explanation of the function can be found on this <a href=”http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php”>page</aq>.

PHP may be an easy language to use and learn but there are simple steps most budding programmers forget when it comes to coding in the scripting language of choice for web pages. The quotes, which come in single and double forms. They may seem inter-changeable but they have two distinct uses; the double quote is used for variables and coding without proper knowledge of this wastes computing time for PHP is forced to look for a non-existent variable wasting precious computing time thus resulting in longer processing.

Example:
$myword = “PHP is Free”;
if ($myword == “PHP is Free”)
{
echo “Learn it Easy”;}

PHP is free! (Most Web hosts provide PHP in even their most basic plans). PHP or the PHP Hypertext Pre-processor is a server-side programming language that gives Web developers it has the ability to build virtually any type of application, from simple contact forms to shopping carts, dynamic job sites, and complex content management systems.

Apache module is a PHP installed Apache configuration files (.httpd) and .htaccess files help its settings to be changed. It also enable or disable PHP safe mode for the entire web server you can use the php.ini file and also allows the file to modify many aspects of PHP configuration.

Next in line is array_diff_uassoc() function which compares two or more arrays while checking for differences before comparing the keys with a user-defined location. It then returns an array withthe keys and values from the first array(to which all the values were comapred against) it the function allows it. Syntax is as follows : array_diff_uassoc(array1,array2,array3….,function). with a sample below of how it is used.

function userdefined($v1,$v2)
{
if ($v1 === $v2)
{
return 0;
}
if ($v1 > $v2)
{
return 1;
}
else
{
return -1;
}
}
$a1=array(0=>”Dog”,1=>”Cat”,2=>”Horse”)
$a2=array(3=>”Dog”,1=>”Cat”,5=>”Horse”)
print_r(array_diff_uassoc($a1,$a2,”userdefined”));
?>

which results in the following output : Array( [0] => Dog [2] => Horse). For an example of the same function with two or more assigned arrays to the function:

function userdefined($v1,$v2)
{
if ($v1 === $v2)
{
return 0;
}
if ($v1 > $v2)
{
return 1;
}
else
{
return -1;
}
}
$a1=array(0=>”Dog”,1=>”Cat”,2=>”Horse”)
$a2=array(3=>”Dog”,1=>”Cat”,5=>”Horse”)
$a3=array(6=>”Onyx”,0=>”Dog”,5=>”Horse”)
print_r(array_diff_uassoc($a1,$a2,$a3,”userdefined”));
?>

Which in turn, gives you : Array ([2] => Horse )

So we see the different array_diff function variants and the diffeerent ways they are used to compare the values of one or more arrays with one another.

The first function, array_diff() is used for comparing several tables or arrays which gives an array with the keys and values from the first array if the value is not available in the other arrays. Syntax is as follows : array_diff(array1,array2,array3……), where array 1 is the table to which all the other arrays will be compared to. The 2nd array(array 2) is an array that is compared with the first array and so on and so forth. Below is sample code of its use and the outcome of the functions comparison :

$a1=array(0=>“Mouse”,1=>”Cat”,2=>”Dog”);
$a2=array(3=>”Dog”,4=>”Cat”,5=>”Lizard”);
print_r(array_diff($a1,$a2));
?>

Giving you the result : Array( [0] =>Mouse )