Daniel0

Right, back on topic people...

I don't support IE versions below 7. If it works then that's fine, if it doesn't then touch luck - upgrade your browser. They'll most likely be able to read the content but it will just look uglier.

Whatever you want If you want mail as well then make sure to setup the MX records as well. Your host will know what they should be.

They will probably want you to use their DNS servers. For instance, if their control panel allows you to create a subdomain then they would automatically update their DNS server to add a corresponding CNAME or A record on the zone file. If you did not use their DNS servers then you would have to update that information yourself. You can safely use their DNS servers and then just change it to something else when you move host. Generally you should allow for up to 72 hours for the changes to propagate across the internet, but I've often found that it will work within a few hours actually.

What do you mean with directing it to? Just change the A record on the domain server to point to the new server instead of the old one. To answer your question, no, you shouldn't run into any problems when migrating.

Why "definitely"? I've never seen the reasoning behind pronouncing it "sequel", so perhaps you could kindly elaborate on this peculiar deviation from the official pronunciation? I don't see how SQL can ever become "sequel". I find it especially ludicrous to say that seeing as there is already another word called "sequel" and therefore it makes no sense to me whatsoever to call a second thing, that is not even remotely associated with that word, "sequel" as well. I hope someone can enlighten me on this.

How do you think real world attacks occur? Do you think the attacker sends the website an email like this:

Re 2) It makes no difference. Objects are always passed by reference so the ampersand is completely redundant. Re 1 and 3) See how I would do it below: <?php class God { private $name; private $creatures = array(); public function __construct($name) { $this->name = $name; echo $this->getName() . ' is a great god' . PHP_EOL; } public function getName() { return $this->name; } public function addCreature(Animal $c) { $this->creatures[] = $c; return $this; } public function getCreature(Animal $c) { if (!in_array($c, $this->creatures)) { return false; } foreach ($this->creatures as $creature) { if ($c === $creature) { return $c; } } } public function getCreatures() { return $this->creatures(); } } abstract class Animal { private $creator; protected $name; public function __construct(God $creator) { $this->creator = $creator; echo $creator->getName() . ' creates a ' . strtolower($this->getName()) . PHP_EOL; } public function getName() { if (empty($this->name)) { $name = get_class($this); $name = str_replace('Animal_', '', $name); return $name; } return $this->name; } public function getCreator() { return $this->creator; } static public function create($type, God $creator) { $class = 'Animal_' . ucwords($type); if (!class_exists($class)) { throw new Exception('Animal ' . $type . ' does not exist'); } return new $class($creator); } } class Animal_Horse extends Animal {} class Animal_Jellyfish extends Animal { protected $name = 'Jellyfish'; } $god = new God('God'); $god->addCreature(Animal::create('horse', $god)) ->addCreature(Animal::create('jellyfish', $god)); ?>

I doubt you'll get extra credit for outbound links coming from well known directories as they do not provide any real value. You might get indexed though. Generally you'll be ranked by relevance and popularity. The relevance is in respect to the user's search query whereas popularity is how many external web pages that link to you. The larger sites that do it the better. However, directories do not provide any real information regarding population so I would expect that such links would be disregarded by search engines providing that they're well known enough to be excluded from their algorithms.

It's not part of the algorithm per se as W3C conformance has nothing to do with the quality or relevance of the content. However, if the spider cannot render your code then your ranking on the SERPs will obviously be degraded. What would that help? It's just a piece of graphic. Google doesn't care whatever standards your markup conforms to. Have you checked the source code of Google's pages? They're far from valid HTML.

The first one, i.e. the correct one.

http://www.phpfreaks.com/blog/learning-to-think-like-a-programmer

With Calibri as default font in MS Office 2007, that might change some day.

Helvetica, Arial and Verdana are all good. Not all people have Helvetica though, but Arial is very close to that. I usually do Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif. For reading on screen it's easier with sans-serif fonts (all of which the before-mentioned are) whereas printed text is often easier to read if it's using a serif font. Ideally you should have around 66 characters per line as that will be easier to read because it will put less strain on the eyes seeing as you do not have to move them horizontally. Using a width of 66em should take care of that. While 66 chars is the ideal, anything within the range 45 to 75 characters would also be acceptable. Aligning the text to the left would be best. Justified text don't work very well on the web because you cannot control the positioning of the individual glyphs. By using justified text you will risk getting what's called rivers through the text. It's basically empty space that looks like rivers through your paragraphs. Those can be distracting when reading and thus make the readability lower. In print design you can manually correct that and compensate for that, but that's not possible on the web. Besides, I recall having read somewhere that sans-serif fonts look best when they're ragged right (i.e. aligned left), but I haven't really looked into that. You will only be able to use a small subset of fonts on the web because you rely on them being installed the client computer. There are alternatives such as sIFR and CSS image replacement using backgrounds, but those should only be used for headlines or other sort of decorative text as they don't work well with large blocks of text. Furthermore, you can also play around with the leading and letter spacing. Setting the leading at around 1.5em will probably be good. If it's too low then the text will look cramped together, if it's too high then it will be difficult to read because of the large vertical space between each line.

The only place I ever see XPS files are from Microsoft, and they're always available in PDF anyways.

I use MS Office. Open Office looks hideous and the UI is simply plain annoying IMO. I don't use MS Office that much though.

Let me get this straight: You wrote that sentence, which completely repeated what purple crayon had already said, just to use a Family Guy joke? Let me get this straight: You wrote that sentence, which consisted of some words, just to misspell a name?

TheFilmGod, If you have nothing valuable to add to the thread then there is no need to click the "Post" button. Thanks.

The Alexa stats are seriously skewed. I doubt very much that Alexa's userbase are representative of the entire world population.

see the sticky.

I wouldn't follow all of The Little Guy's advices. Some of them are known as "blackhat SEO techniques" and you'll risk getting banned by the search engine (i.e. no links to your site will display on the SERPs whatsoever). Things like cloaking (showing some content for users and other content for web crawlers) and keyword stuffing (trying to squeeze as many keywords on the page as possible (this is especially the case if they're more or less irrelevant) to increase rankings) both fall into that category. The points I'm specifically referring to are number three and the thing about duplicate title tags.

This can be the "SEO resources" topic then. I'll sticky it.

Talk them into switching. And while you're at it, persuade them into getting a VPS or dedicated server so you can get some "real" hosting so you wont have to rely on insecure protocols such as FTP. Edit: agreed

Maybe they're running a Java applet or something which will grant them access to do that. Individual programs can register themselves with various "protocols" in Firefox, but even if you define your own, of what use would it then be seeing as it will only work on your computer?

You can't, and it's for security reasons. Otherwise you might run all sorts of malicious commands on the client computer.