Category: Technical Discussions

February 28, 2006 / Technical Discussions
February 24, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

I just saw a forum post asking the difference between -> and => and it’s one of those tricky questions to research, just how can a search engine understand what you’re asking?

Well, luckily the answer is quite simple.

-> is used by objects to set, get or call a method of that object.
Ref: Chapter 18. Classes and Objects (PHP 4)

=> is used by arrays to describe the relationship between the key and the value
Ref: Arrays

Here’s an example of how the -> is used in a class

February 24, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation
February 10, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

I’m not sure I quite “get” GoogleBase just yet – in as much as Google is already indexing my sites so why do I need to submit my content all over again into this system… and who would actually use it to find stuff – surely the standard Google Search Engine is doing a good enough job?

I received my newsletter from the phpClasses today and noticed that there was a tool to make it easier to upload articles and information to GoogleBase so I thought I’d give it a try.

PhpBase

The code is still quite new and there are only a few options but it’s easy enough to extend and use. Documentation is needed and I’m sure it will follow. Given that the author appears to be Spanish I think it’s already pretty good.

February 5, 2006 / Technical Discussions
January 24, 2006 / WordPress

One thing I haven’t become involved with is writing plugins for WordPress but I have been looking at ways to make my blog more efficient.

I tried out a tag system back in October but found that it generated too many tags and often irrelevant tags so finally scrapped it in favour of the plugins from Ultimate Tag Warrior produced by fellow kiwi Christine Davis (who I don’t actually know ;)). Her system allowed me to produce a “Tag Cloud” which is pretty cool.

I haven’t totally got my head around the custom tags page with url rewriting but for now I’m happy with urls like /index.php?tag=kiwi and I’ve learnt a little about templates.

So when I posted some info about the UTW plugin at DigitalPoint one of the members asked about Category Archives and gave a new plugin to use. I took a look and couldn’t quite work out how to use it, so took the lessons from UTW and applied them!

January 17, 2006 / Fun and SEO Games
January 16, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation