I have used many methods to do this in the past but recently I found two really useful built in PHP functions. urlencode() and urldecode().

Alternatives to using urlencode() would be writing your own function to convert all the url unfriendly symbols, slashes, spaces etc. into HTML entities or just replacing them with hyphens.

Again PHP has an built in function for everyhting.

To begin with I am going to go through how to use the Charts Basics API from Google. This is an extremely easy one to start off with as you don’t require an API key or to install anything, you don’t even need a dynamic server side script to get some nice results.

For this example I am going to jazz it up with a bit of PHP using an associative array but you can easily replace this with a database or XML feed.

To call a chart we use the query string linking to the API which will end up looking something like this.

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=250x100&amp;chd=t:10,80,35,10&amp;cht=lc&amp;chl=wk1|wk2|wk3|wk4"
alt="Sample chart" />

To generate this dynamicaly I used the following code

$arr = array();

$arr['Jan']['wk1'] = 10;
$arr['Jan']['wk2'] = 80;
$arr['Jan']['wk3'] = 35;
$arr['Jan']['wk4'] = 10;

$chart= 'http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?';
$chartsize = 'chs=250x100';
$type = "cht=lc";
$vals = 'chd=t:';
$keys = 'chl=';
$alt = "January";

foreach( $arr['Jan'] as $key => $value){
	$vals .= $value.',';
	$keys .= $key.'|';
	}

And Lastly to pull all the code together.

<img src="<? echo $chart;?>
<? echo $chartsize;?>
&amp;<? echo substr("$vals", 0, -1);?>
&amp;<? echo $type;?>
&amp;<? echo substr("$keys", 0, -1);?>"
alt="Sample chart" />

To develop this example further use the official documentation available here Google Chart Basic

For this example I have chosen to list the files from a directory as this will keep the script fairly dynamic without the need of a database. The script could be easily modified to use a database but we can come back to that later on if we need to.

To start off all you will need is a folder with several banners and a page to display them on.

$dir will be the directory you have created to grab the images from, it is important to make sure this folder only contains banners.
$banners will be the array of images found in the given folder.

 $banners = array();
  $dir = 'res/banners/';
  if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
  while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
  if($file != "." && $file != ".."){
  $banners[] = $file;
  }
  }
  closedir($handle);
  }

  $rand = array_rand($banners,1);
  echo "<img src='".$dir.$banners[$rand]."' alt='banner'/>";   

The code above uses a few handy built in PHP functions:
opendir()
readdir()
array_rand()
print_r()

It is an  easy way to compare two values and select the right one. There are a few ways to use this but the basic jist of it is to compare two values and if its is true use the first value after the question mark, or if the condition returns false use the second value.

echo $targetvar =  ($somevar == "thisVar" ? "itIsTrue" : "itIsFalse");

In the example above we can set $targetvar with the condition. it will compare the first two variables with whatever you use, more then less then etc and it will choose the correct value from the two after the question mark.

A good way to keep your sites listing after a redevelopment is to use a redirect. If you are using an Apache server you can use the .htaccess file to redirect.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html

But some times this isnt the best way if you have to redirect hundreds of pages. The alternative is to use a header redirect in PHP. Most web based languages such as ASP or RUBY will do the same thing but with different code.


<?php

// make this code the first line
header("Location: /newpage.php",TRUE,301); // 301 Moved Permanently to newpage.php
?>

Developing our own can be much more versatile as we can gather information straight from the server using PHP’s Predefined variables.

You can add your own version of with a database and a few lines of PHP code.

$time = mktime();
if (isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'])) {   // HTTP-method
   $method = $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'];
} else {
   $method = "";
}
if (isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])) {      // IP-adress
   $ip_adress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
} else {
   $ip_adress = "";
}
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {  // Browser
   $browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
} else {
   $browser = "";
}
if (isset($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])) {         // Current page
   $page = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
} else {
   $page = "";
}
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {    // Previous page
   $referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
} else {
   $referer = "";
}

$sql="INSERT INTO user_log (time, method, page, referer, adress, browser) // Insert into database as new row
					VALUES('$time','$method','$page','$referer','$ip_adress','$browser')";
mysql_query($sql);

The foreach loop will process each of the requests set to the page. The $_REQUEST can be changed to just $_POST to check only posted form data or any other type of request.

The following loop contains a few examples of what you could do with the request once you have it.

foreach ($_REQUEST as $key => $value)
{
$value = mysql_real_escape_string( $value );
$value = addslashes($value);
$value = strip_tags($value);
if($value != ""){$requestnumber ++;}
echo $key. ' - '.$value.'</br>';
}