What is RSS and Why You Should Use It

How many pages a day do you visit and how much time do you spend visiting sites?

I use to spend close to 6 or more hours a day going from site to site looking to see if new content was there. I would visit news sites, blogs, forums and various other sites. This consumed a lot of my time but it seemed like the only solution.

Then about a year ago I started to hear about this thing called RSS. I did some investigation and noticed that almost 75% of the sites I visited had this little RSS button on them. So I downloaded an Outlook plug-in from Newsgator and started testing what this RSS thing was.

To my surprise I received new content into my inbox from these sites I use to visit. I didn’t have to go out and find the new content the new content found me. Those hours of going from site to site to was cut down now because I didn’t have to check if new content was updated.

The one issue I had with the Outlook solution was that it bogged my system down. Based on Matt’s recommendation I started testing Google Reader. Their reader is 100% online and will definitely not bog down your system. I also found a Google Reader Notifier that lets me know when new content is available.

So what is RSS?

Wikipedia summarizes it as…
“a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.”

Why should I use RSS?

It will free up the time you spend online seeking out new content. Instead the new content will come to you. Also unlike spam if you don’t want to get the content anymore you can unsubscribe and never get it again.

If you want to test out an RSS reader sign up at Google Reader and then add our RSS Feed.

How to Bypass Company Firewalls to Access cPanel

So your at work and the system admin has decided that like BOFH (his hero) he is going to make your life hell when it comes to viewing your email and stats in cPanel.

Fear not fellow webmaster!

You can access your cPanel using a script. cPanel Proxy is a great script you can install into your cPanel so you can access cPanel and webmail even if you are behind a company firewall.

To install follow these simple instructions (at home where your not blocked)…

• Create subdomain “cpanel.yourdomain.com”
• Download and unzip cPanelProxy.zip
• Upload the files to the subdomains directory, probably “public_html/cpanel”  in FTP

Now your ready to access your cPanel and by pass the company firewall.

PHP Tutorial - Part 2 of 5

In Part 1 of our PHP Tutorial series we covered how to use PHP and HTML together and use the print command.

In this one we will learn to use variables and use the date command. If you have never programmed before then the concept of a variable may be new to you. A variable is like a box in which you can store something for later. For example you may store the date or name of a person in a variable so that you can use it later in the code. A quick example is to open notepad again and add the following code then save it as a .php file and upload to your site:

<?php
$variable1=”Bob”;
$last_name=”Smith”;
Print(”Hello my name is $variable1 $last_name”);
?>

In the above example there are 2 variables ($variable1 and $last_name). When using a variable the name needs to start with a dollar sign ($) and not have any spaces in it. If you are setting the variable to be text then you will need to use an equals with the text in brackets. Remember that all lines in PHP end with a semicolon (;).

A variable does not have to be text but can be a function. For example if we wanted to display the date we could do the following:

<?php
$now=date(”F j, Y, g:i a”);
Print(”The date today is $now”);
?>

Again be sure to save the file with a .php extension and upload it to your site. In this example you should see the current date.

Stay tuned as we will continue this tutorial with more details on using PHP.

PHP Tutorial - Part 1 of 5

What is PHP?
PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a programming language which allows you to create web applications. PHP is widely used by many developers and is a very easy language to learn to use. There is lots of documentation on PHP at there site on how to use PHP.

Using PHP and HTML Together
You can mix PHP and HTML together in on page. PHP complies or runs on the server before sending to the browser so mixing PHP together with HTML is not a problem. For PHP to work on our servers you will need to save your files with a .php extension instead of a .html (or .htm).

Try the following example. Open up your notepad and enter the following:

 <html><head></head><body>
<b>
<?php Print(”Hello Word”); ?>
</b>
</body></html>

Save the file as example.php and upload it to your site. You will see that it outputs in bold Hello World. The print command lets you simply display text or variable on the screen. Notice how the PHP is encased with <?php and ?>. Also make note that after each php line you should have a semicolon.

Stay tuned as we will continue this tutorial with more details on using PHP.