PHP editor under development

While developing the CBIntuition script, I needed a decent PHP editor. Whenever your write code, whether it's a web script or a conventional programming language, life is a lot easier if the display is syntax-highlighted.
What this means is that the script or programming language's keywords are displayed in a different style - bold for example. Numbers and text are displayed in different colours, as are comments. This makes programming a lot easier.
There are a number of highlighting editors available, but I remembered that I once wrote a highlighting editor for the Pascal and C++ programming languages. With a bit of tweaking, this could become a web page editor which recognises and highlights PHP, HTML, Javascript and XML.
So PHPIntuition is born.
Another useful feature of programmers editors is "code snippets". This is an idea I came up with years ago, and evidently many other programmers have thought of too.
Basically it's a set of "library" functions that can be simply pasted in to your code wherever you need them. Similarly, if you write some code that you might use again and again, you can create your own snippets.
PHPIntuition provides you with a set of snippet libraries for PHP, HTML and JavaScript. Additionally, it lets you save your own snippets.

The expected release date of PHPIntuition is during the first quarter of 2008.

We'll keep you posted.

Computing Guide

The newly revamped site mentioned in yesterday's post is coming along nicely. At time of writing it contains three of the original articles from the site. I plan to write another article today, which will be completely fresh material, to help the Google rank along.

The site still needs a bit of customisation because I copied the script directly from another one of my sites and it contains links that I don't really want.

I plan to add an index of "10 most recent articles" on the opening page because at the moment, you're simply presented with a large bundle of Google Ads. That's not particularly inviting.

I'll also be adding new ad blocks using my CBIntuition script, which displays ClickBank ads in the same style as Google Ads.
I can create different ad blocks for each article category, using the most relevant keywords for that category. This means the ads will be much better targeted.

Finally, I want to overhaul the look of the site. It's quite dull to say the least.
I'm not sure whether the script uses themes or CSS or not, but I can freely modify the code anyway.

Another site gets a revamp

I recently acquired a PHP script for making article sites.

I used it to create my Home & Garden articles site.

It seems to work reasonably well, so I decided to use it for another of my sites, A Practical Guide to Computing.
It was already an article site, but consisted entirely of static pages. That made it very difficult to maintain, and being the lazy type that I am, I stopped maintaining it.

Now I am being a bit cunning about the revamp. The site already contained over 100 articles, but it didn't rank anywhere in Google, and it has fallen down the Alexa rankings to greater than 10,000,000.

So, yesterday I set up the site with just one article, and today I created a new Google Sitemap and submitted it. It's just come back with a status of OK, so I can now put my plan into action.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Google likes sites that update regularly.
So, every day I'll reintroduce one of the old articles and update the sitemap to reflect the new page. In addition, I'll add completely new articles that I write myself from time to time.
Google should then see the site as a very active one, with a decent amount of content. Admittedly, some of that content will be duplicate (the original articles came from other article sites), but my own articles will be all new content.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this "live" site attains a Google PageRank higher than zero.

Of course, it's not just about content - Google likes to see external links to the site, so I'll work on obtaining some of them. I shall not be using link farms or reciprocal links - I want good quality one-way links.

Breakthrough

The data file for my new script, CBIntuition, comes from the ClickBank Marketplace in ZIP format. I've been tearing my hair out trying to get a PHP script to unzip it.
Most of the scripts that I've found depend upon the Zlib library being linked in to PHP on the host server. My host's servers don't appear to have the library built in, and as I don't own the host servers, I can't add it.

A new friend of mine, found via an online forum, has just furnished me with a library, DUnzip2 that will do the job. It's not his library, but I have to say thanks to him the Admin of CBIntuition is now one step nearer completion.

PHP Scripts

Almost everyone who's got seriously into developing interactive websites would agree that it doesn't get any easier than using PHP and MySQL.

Having now spent the last couple of weeks working on a script using PHP, I'm inclined to agree.

The script, CBIntuition, delivers Adsense-style advertisements for products on the ClickBank marketplace.

And this has spawned another related idea, which I'll be calling MyIntuition until I find a better name.
Basically, it will deliver similar, AdSense-style ads, but the advertisements will be for your own products, or other affiliate links (ie not ClickBank).

The idea is that the user will be able to add their own advertisements to a MySQL database and the script will then deliver ads from that database.

I'll be working on the script just as soon as the CBIntuition script is finished.