specializing in digital media technologies

A reader named Max posted a suggestion in my book forums that I include a checklist of final steps to take before a Web site goes live (read his post). I don’t know if it’ll make it into a book but it’s a good idea so I thought I’d give it its due here. In this first post I’ll discuss general steps to take, regardless of the technologies being used. In a separate post, I’ll discuss PHP and MySQL specific steps; later, I’ll post for a Ruby on a Rails site.

Once you’ve finalized all the functionality and appearance of a site (or thought you have, at least), you should… (continue reading…)

One important topic in PHP is how to know when to handle a form’s submission. If you have two pages–page.html and handle_page.php–the assumption is that whenever handle_page.php is accessed, it’s handling a form. This may not always be true, but is a reasonable enough assumption. However, more commonly the same page is used to both display and handle an HTML form. In such situations, that page is being accessed twice: once when the form is loaded and a second time when the form is submitted back to this same form. The trick is being able to identify which stage the page is in. (continue reading…)