Although I enjoy building and designing website structures and templates, the vast majority of the “Get Rick Quick” and “I don’t care about facts” mindsets people convey incited me to think twice about entering this profession. The lack of knowledge in these circles is astounding. Some ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about coding websites and designing databases think terms like dofollow and “Off Page Optimization” are legitimate. Other fools still believe Visible PageRank is an accurate measurement tool in anything. And some decide to defend these positions vigorously.

Unbelievable!

If I can take away one thing from posting on “forum debates” and elsewhere however, it’s that conversing with people that have next to no experience on website building and a lackluster understanding on simple concepts like HTML structure is an absolute time-waster.

It’s not about “agreeing with everything I say” or “using only my methods”, doing so for the sole purpose of agreeing with someone doesn’t have any logic to it. But when their views are challenged with hard evidence and facts, they choose to either make personal attacks, bury their heads in the sand and mumble “Blah, blah, blah”, or continue to follow the words of self-proclaimed experts and listen to their gospel like sheep. Seriously, it’s like debating with four year olds.

If you want the state of the industry summed up in a nutshell, heed this quote from Adam Senour (one of the few people online that I still hold a great deal of respect for):

One person starts lie that sounds good.
People believe lie that sounds good.
People promote lie that sounds good as ultimate solution.
If someone comes along and either questions lie or argues that lie is not ultimate solution, people must resort to aspect of lie that sounds most applicable to question.
If no applicable aspect of lie can be found, resort to randomly-selected training-binderesque aspect of lie that has nothing to do with actual problem in attempt to confuse.

In other words, lie, and when called out, create intentionally vague environment.

So the bottom-line here is basically, it’s pointless trying to educate people that refuse to listen or want to be helped. I’ll still continue my WordPress business I started a few months back, and I’ll be happy to answer genuine newbie questions on my forums. However when it comes to forum discussions or other forms of debates on Web Development tactics, SEO, or whatever else, I’m done trying to otherwise “help”. I’m tired of explaining things in a vacuum.

(UPDATE 12/16/2009 = due to some legal technicalities, I changed the domain and revamped my business site.)

Engipress is my professional output for anything and everything related to WordPress. I designed the WordPress Theme, designed the vBulletin forum skin, and I even went out of my way to find great mods to enhance the forum posting experience, all done by myself (to assist in showcasing my skills).

The designs are intertwined to give a great overall similar feel for the new website structure (The vBulletin forum sits atop the WP Theme forum), so the forum doesn’t impair the blog’s CSS layout or font stylings.

Perhaps the main attraction of this new website for me will be to contract freelance website work for those using WordPress as either a Blog or Content Management System. Just visit my hire page to see what services I offer. I’m very flexible with the pricing as I realize different people will require different needs for what they want to accomplish.

Also as a FYI, any posts relating to WordPress or blogging will probably be made on my Engipress Blog from now on. This doesn’t mean I’ll be neglecting Lightning Shock, it just represents the fact that my personal website will be shifting directions in a sense.

I feel I’m doing everyone a favor by providing this great resource to anyone who uses wordpress or plans to.

So basically, I’m going to explain here exactly what you need to do to create a simple PHP / MySQL backed DB-driven website that draws all of the data straight from the database.

An example URL of a page we’ll create could look like this:

http://www.site.com/index.php?id=1

1) Prepare the Front-End Design and Content

First, you’ll want to make sure that you have the basic design of the site coded. You may use whatever CSS styling you want to, it won’t make any difference on the backend. (One index.html file is fine, but be sure to rename it as index.php once it goes online.) Also all the information for our website needs to be properly entered into the database. Using a tool such as phpmyadmin will work great to enter the data, however you can use SQL if you wish. For the purpose of keeping this tutorial quick, I’m going to assume that you already know how to do this.

To keep things extremely simple, we’ll only need to create one table, I decided to name mine “page”. Also include a minimum of two fields (I’m using three) and two pages to understand what’s going on. Below is an example of a DB table that you could use:

You can use whatever data you wish, however most sites have these pages and that’s what I have decided to use. Also be sure to set the ID to the primary key, so it’ll automatically update later when you decide to add more webpages.

2) Connect to the DB and Format the Website Structure

Alright, next step. After we get all that out of the way, we now need to interact with our database table we just created, so we need to use PHP to configure a connection. You can include this in a few different ways, what I did was create a config.php file and wrote a require_once function to include the data from the PHP file onto my main index.php page.

There’s plenty of other sites that go into more depth on this, but I’ll give you an example here. For the config.php file:

<?php
$username="DB_USERNAME";
$password="DB_PASSWORD";
$database="DB_NAME";
$url="localhost";

$link = mysql_connect($url,$username,$password);

mysql_select_db($database) or die("Unable to select database");

mysql_close();

?>

And as for the index.php page, I know this probably could have been more securely coded (aka placing the DB retrieval info before the DOCTYPE), but for simplicity’s sake, here’s an example file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html>

    <head>

        <?php require_once ("config.php"); ?>

        <?php require_once ("functions.php"); ?>

    <title>

    </title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" />

    </head>

    <body>

        <?php require_once ("header.php"); ?>

        <?php require_once ("content.php"); ?>

        <?php require_once ("footer.php"); ?>

    </body>

</html>

Note this also includes other files, like the header, function, and footer documents, but they aren’t required to have, they’re just apart of the design structure.

3) Write the PHP Script

Now all we need to do is get the database to actually read the different DB rows as separate webpages. To do this we will be using the PHP superglobal associative array $_GET, and a mysql_fetch function. If you caught the additional function in the above index.php file, we also included a file called content.php. This is where the script will be stored. First, we need to write some PHP variables:

$id = $_GET['id'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM Page WHERE id='$id'";

$results = mysql_query($query, $link) or die(mysql_error());

If you noticed, we assigned the $id variable to the PHP superglobal $_GET, where we want it to “get” the ID from each column and return all the information in that row based upon it’s ID, and what we tell it to later, which you can tell by the SQL query I wrote for the $query variable. The $results variable basically just combines everything we want it to do and kill it in case there’s an error, (You can see what we’re getting from the $link variable in the config.php file).

The $_GET superglobal is also useful for passing variables onto the end of a URL string. Let me try to explain. Since the script is asking for the ID from the page table we created earlier, we can now apprehend a result to the end of the URL via a question mark (?). For example, say we want to fetch the data contained in the first row, we can call upon the ID to fetch us everything we ask for (which is what we’re going to write next). I know, it sounds confusing, but with more practice, you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

Now to actually display that data on the webpage, we need to write a while loop using a mysql_fetch_array PHP function:

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($results))

    {

    echo "<div id='title'>" . $row['title'] . "</div> <div id='content'>" . $row['content'];

    echo "</div><br />";

    }

?>

The while loop basically tells us that “while” we are fetching the DB row info, here’s what we’re doing with it. In this instance, just echoing the data onto the page. Since the first thing we are asking for is the data contained within the title column, the PHP will display this for us via the $row variable, because it “fetches” this specific instance of the array (whatever we ask for when we type the URL address in).

You could also base the URL off of other portions of the DB table if you wanted to, like “title” for example. You’d just have to get the title data via the $_GET superglobal and ask for it when you assign the value to an array via a variable (aka $title = $_GET['title'];) along with altering the other variables appropriately. You can name your variables whatever you wish, I just used $title for convenience.

In addition to the PHP, I’ve also echoed some div elements which help style the content appropriately through the stylesheet (they’re not a portion of the tutorial, but you can use whatever CSS properties you desire to apply).

Now after understanding the technical aspects behind the PHP code, we just need to put it all together. Save the following code as content.php:

<?php

$id = $_GET['id'];

$query = "SELECT * FROM Entry_Page WHERE id='$id'";

$results = mysql_query($query, $link) or die(mysql_error());

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($results))

    {

    echo "<div id='title'>" . $row['title'] . "</div> <div id='content'>" . $row['content'];

    echo "</div><br />";

    }

?>

4) Place the Finishing Touches on the Site

And now upload everything to the server, all in the same folder: index.php, config.php, and content.php (also header.php, footer.php, and style.css if you bothered to edit / create them yourself, so the site doesn’t look like crap).

Now you can access the different pages you created by calling upon the MySQL database via the various URL variables, in essence “creating the webpages based upon whatever information is stored within the field’s (ID’s) row”.

And there you have it, your very first Database-Driven Website!

If you haven’t noticed, blogs and other community-oriented websites (this one being a fringe example) become bombarded with this form of ignorance every single day. On average, I’ll read about ten to fifteen topics a day from clueless people that more or less destroy the IQ of whomever is viewing their messages.

If you’re going to make a post on a forum somewhere, or especially if you’re going to write a comment on this website, adhere to the following tips precisely!

Do Proper Research First

One of the most common forms of online amentia is the dumbass question asker:

Hi Frnds! What is the best way to become popular?

What is a backlink? Can u plz advise me 2 get site in top 10 of Google?

If you’re going to log on to a website and start creating topics that ask very basic questions that a monkey could string together, don’t even bother. Find something more productive to do with your time, like re-reading your third grade text books.

What should you do if you’re in the group that has to put up with this crap? Direct these lazy ass bums to a tool that they can actually use to find an answer (and quit wasting everyone else’s time), a reliable Search Engine!

Titles are Everything

Every now and then I’ll see a subject heading somewhere along the lines of:

Is this Possible in any form?

How to do this?

HELP! I don’t know what to do!

Question: What do all these titles have in common? Answer: They’re stupid and provide as little information as possible!

Do you really think we know what you mean when you ask something like “What is wrong with my webpage?”? Sure, you and those closest to you may be able to decipher the general question, but for those of us that don’t have telepathic powers, do us a favor and either A) specifically tell us what the problem is; or B) shut the fuck up.

Bottom line? Write a descriptive title that intelligent people can actually interpret and return information to you as quickly as possible. You think I enjoy playing Twenty Questions with you? I’m not going to waste my time, I’ve got better things to do.

Don’t Use Fancy Styling

If you’re one of those dipshits whom likes to post in different fonts, colors, and sizes, you will only succeed at one thing, pissing me off. Save the blue, tiny, Italian style micro-fonts for your traffic-less, diary blog that no one reads, not everyone has binocular vision.

The worst of these offenders is probably the semi right-wing Bible-quoter. (And I use the term “semi” in the context that the idiot can’t make up his mind on what the hell he’s talking about, however the same could be said about all politically minded individuals.) These verse-hounding loonies love to preach on and on about ‘God loves you, 8:16′ and ‘Matthew 2:14 says something else’ and other extreme, random Christian bullshit, even when the topic has nothing to do with religion. If you just happen to fall under the category of “Bible Bitch”, do the world a favor and seal away your thoughts tighter than a peanut butter jar at a squirrel convention.

Don’t Quote Wikipedia as a Primary Source of Information

Every once in a while I’ll stumble across the odd post where some asshole decides he’ll be clever and rely upon the fountain of misinformation that is Prickipedia for proper fact-checking. All I can do is laugh in their face and give them a swift kick in the ass towards the right direction.

How people can trust a source that is editable by ANYONE is beyond logical comprehension. Someone once wrote that Joesph Stalin actually went through a “homosexual experimentation stage” in college and that the Earth’s Moon was composed entirely of cheese (I wish I were making this stuff up). The ridiculousness doesn’t stop there however, the encyclopedia (I use that term loosely) currently contains pointless articles such as Nazi UFOs and Whale Explosions. Unbelievable.

Write using a clear, proper, and concise approach

Hey DUDE!

Hv U herd the newz??? Do U thnk dey shud hv du dat? lol @ y this iz happinin. i h8 those fagz,dat tink their rulin of the wurld!!! How mny of dem bitchz,like to suk dik? Srsly, wut u thin shud be dun bout dis mess, Ya no???

i’m from China
i wnt to make friends wiv u
thank you
my msn:imamoron@aol.com

You wouldn’t believe how many messages and emails I’ve seen that follow this line of syntax. If the grammar and capitalization mistakes don’t scare you, the misspellings and lack of vowels certainly will.

The Mount Everest of the world that is Instant Messaging Crap, is without a doubt spelling the word “You” as “U” (not to be confused with equally inane “your / you’re” mistakes). If you’re too much of a lazy ass dolt that making TWO EXTRA KEYSTROKES places extensive strain on your fingers, then you probably shouldn’t be using a computer at all! Sell the machine before it gives you a brain aneurysm.

I don’t even bother with many of the comments I read here on THIS website. I grow tired of pissing away time attempting to decrypt the ‘txt spk’ contained within every other message I have the misfortune of viewing.

These are the same sorts of people that type in all caps, write huge blobs of text (break up that paragraph for readability reasons, fool), and can’t even be bothered to properly punctuate a paragraph. Maybe you should have actually paid attention during English class instead of yammering on with your classmates about who’s going out with whom, and whom got laid last night, bitch.

Seriously, do you people even consider what you’ve typed into the textarea before clicking that “Add Comment” button?

Don’t Copy and Paste

If you actually gave two-shits about the place you were posting to, you wouldn’t spam them with duplicate articles and misinformation.

Don’t act like a Crybaby Loser

If someone doesn’t reply to your inquiry, it’s not that we think you’re an idiot (well, that’s an entirely different matter), but members might not know the answer you’re seeking right away, not everyone is a walking encyclopedia of problem solving.

The odds of you screwing up and STILL making one of these mistakes are roughly about ten thousand to one, so here’s the steps you should take:

1. Get Over It.

If you don’t enjoy the replies you get on a certain site, or you’ve got tough issues you absolutely must hammer out and debate on, you can always find somewhere else to hang out. If that option doesn’t do it for you, don’t forget you can always feel free to get bent.

The site consists of five different puzzles. Finishing each will allow you to move onto the next one. The rules are fairly simple in that respect.

You do not need to have an understanding of HTML, Javascript, or any other coding language to complete the quiz, although they can certainly help.

Take the Great Webmaster Puzzle Challenge Today!

Also, tell me how it went for you, and what you liked and didn’t like about the test:

• Were there enough challenges?
• Any advantages or disadvantages you could spot?
• Was it simply too easy?

Comment below and tell me about your experience with this new concept I came up with over the past week.

Ajax = The #1 language of plumbers worldwide.

ASP = Stands for Arachnid Spider Presence. It’s the language used by electronic spider crawlers to weave the web together.

ASP.NET = Same as ASP, except the spiders are armed with nets they shoot out of their rear to assist with the weaving.

BASIC = Boot Camp for programmers, this is where they go to learn the ‘basics’.

C = Your language for average programmers, given they couldn’t earn a grade above C in school.

C++ = A really difficult and more confusing version of the C programming language.

C# = The musical implementation of C.

ColdFusion = The programming language of Nuclear Scientists and Astrophysicists, who often conduct and compile the code in deep space.

CSS = Short for Corrupt Schutzstaffel. Extensively used by Web Nazis to force old school webmasters to design within their standards. CSS has it’s roots in Germany, where Hitler used this language to plan the holocaust before World War II.

Flash = What female programmers do.

HTML = Abbreviated form of How-To-Make-a-Language. It’ll present tutorials and examples needed ro understand web programming and site creation.

Java = This language requires you to not only become addicted to coffee, but you must also learn how to code with it.

Javascript = Hollywood’s version of Java. Don’t forget that after you finish writing your script, you must submit it to every web director(y) you can find for approval.

MySQL = Stands for My-Station’s-Quick-Learner. My Network TV is a prime example of this language in action. See PHP for details.

Perl = A shortened version of pearl, commonly used by upper-class people to show off their wealth.

PHP = Short for Programming-with-a-Highdef-Priority. Geeks often use this method to to multi-task (ala setting their TiVOs and watching Television) when writing their code. Often used in conjunction with a station’s quick learner for creating efficient television programming schedules.

Python = The programming language of snakes. Learn it if you have a fondness for scales and slithering.

Ruby = The sister language of Perl.

Visual Basic = Just a more graphic and violent version of basic, see basic above.

XHTML = HTML on Steroids.

XML = An erotic markup language, basically used to create porn sites.

There you go, every programming language you need to know or learn, hopefully this list will help you choose a new place to begin as much as it did for me.

The Slime Zone is a gaming site that adds a new and addicting take on various sports and competitions, in addition to the general selection of arcade games you find on most of these types of sites. I find two of the slime games particularly fun:

One Slime

This game is a slime variation of volleyball.

I’m not the best at it though. The highest place I was ever able to reach was the match against the Psycho Slime. I can’t beat that S.O.B.!

Soccer Slime

The second game on my favorites list should be pretty straightforward, given the title.

This one I’m a little better at. I’ve been able to win the World Cup a few times and once scored over 30 points during a qualifying round.

Slime Away

The games are composed entirely of flash and java, which means you’ll need the appropriate plugins installed on your computer to play them (most machines already do by default).

The place even provides multiplayer variations in addition to playing against a CPU. I highly recommend checking this website out and trying some of the games in your spare time!

It is possible to reiterate each video on it’s own, all you have to do is enter in a URI with specific looping parameters. The following is the format you will use to accomplish this task:

http://www.youtube.com/v/(VideoID)&loop=1

This will redirect you to a much longer URI, but don’t worry about it, it will still achieve the same results. To see a full list of Youtube parameters available, just visit their embedded player parameters page.

To find the ID of a Youtube video however, visit the video page as you would normally would, like this one for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUVwcnhoUJQ

Every character after the equals sign is included in the video ID (meaning this video’s ID is YUVwcnhoUJQ). So in order to repeat this video automatically (and to see an example of a repeating video in action), the full URI will be:

http://www.youtube.com/v/YUVwcnhoUJQ&loop=1

This is a great way to listen to your favorite songs over and over again without much effort, (while purchasing the song or album at a later date, of course).

UPDATE 5/18/2009 = The old video seems to have died, so I put up another one, a really great new song.

It wasn’t the first time they sent me something either, it happened once before.

Now, just yesterday, I received even another piece of mail requesting the same amount of money for another listing. Persistent little bastards they are. Here’s just a snippet of the supposed “Listing” includes (taken straight from the letter, word-for-word):

Domain name submission with up to 8 keywords / phrases to 20 established search engines

Initial search engine position and ranking report sent to you via e-mail

Quarterly search engine position and ranking reports sent to you via e-mail

“Up to 8 Keywords / phrases” for only $65, boy, what a BARGAIN (not). I don’t know what they mean by “20 established Search Engines” either, but it sure doesn’t develop a trustworthy stance in my eyes. Search Engines don’t work that way.

Apparently they keep all their “records” at web-listings.net (the company’s website). Be sure to take a look at what I found on their FAQ page:

What are ‘meta tags’?

The meta tag in HTML is not a required tag when you’re creating your web pages. The meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. While modern search engines mostly look at the content of your pages, meta tags are still sometimes important for ensuring that the search engine properly classifies your site. For assistance in generating your meta tags, see one of the many free online meta tag generators like this one or this one.

What is this, 1998?!? What major SE has used them recently?

Don’t they know how Search Engines operate? Major, “established” ones such as Google have thousands of datacenters they use to display their results to users. What one person sees in their results is NOT what someone else sees, and on top of that, rankings fluctuate, meaning they don’t stay the same forever. New sites come up with better page content for targeted queries all the time.

Something else also smells fishy here, as I don’t know how they received my actual U.S. Address. And I don’t remember giving it out to anyone. The only possible way they could have obtained is through accessing my whois information.

This is the third letter I’ve received from “Web Listings Inc.” And I have more than a suspicion that they’re attempting to scam me, given the ridiculous “Services” they offer, along with the unprofessional approach they’ve taken towards me and my website. They even make special note in the letter to only send checks, and they highlight the point “DO NOT SEND CASH”, hmmmm, wonder why?

SEO / SEM Companies should be contacted by their Potential Clients, not the other way around!

Don’t follow that! dofollow this instead.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dofollow

Just because one Search Engine implements a new value for the relationship attribute of anchor elements doesn’t mean you have to refer to the norm as something else based of the new value.

.

But hey, as long as we’re inventing new HTML Attribute Values and making up buzzwords, I have a few more I’d like to add to the list:

Badfollow = an OBL’s value telling Google that the page it’s linking to is awful and absolutely SUCKS!

Example = <a href=”http://forums.digitalpoint.com/” rel=”badfollow”>Digital Point Forums</a>

NoText = This is a brand new HTML style Attribute Value added to various text elements (ie: <p>, <h1>, etc.) you use to tell the browser you don’t want the text to be displayed anywhere in any fashion. It will look something like this:

<p style=”notext”>This is some Text.</p>

Which will output this:

.

Perfect to use for Text you don’t want to show anyone who visits the Page! Even Search Engines will ignore this Element now!

Superlink = a new link descriptor that takes you to another web page and then brings you back to the original page almost instantaneously. It’ll be like you never left the first page to begin with!

Just add “super” to the target attribute, like so:

<a href=”http://www.lightningshock.com” target=”super”>Greatest Website Ever</a>

.

These new Values are going to be a MUST for any SEO, new or experienced, or any webmaster for that matter, who wishes to code and market their site properly!