donbueck

Great question! I think everyone probably does it differently though. One of the best methods that I have adopted (for the bigger projects) is to start by writing technical documents. Describe the features, how they interact, behavior, etc. That way you avoid a lot of problems down the road. Once you have the outline, things tend to fall into place pretty much of their own accord.

Yes, to the best of my knowledge Google will always show up in the headers as Googlebot. Another problem to consider is that spammers can spoof those headers. See this Google blog entry.

I wouldn't have it email you every time a bot hits a page, it could be a lot of emails. Also, you might want to use $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] to get the IP address. Also, check out the get_browser() function, might have some tidbits for you. Could you get away with using the Apache logs to track bots after they visit?

It's a little tough without more information, but I'll give it a try. Try creating 5 initial tables, for the workers, building, resources, units, and technologies. You'll probably need a player table as well. One idea would be to use a 'many-to-many' table to join the player table to the other tables. So for instance, you would have another table called player_workers, with two fields, player_id and worker_id. And so on... A great place to start working through these issues is by researching database normalization. Very fascinating stuff as well. Best of luck!

Hi! Your question is a little unclear. What kind of reminder system are you trying to create? I'd recommend that you start a little lower than a monitoring system if you need to learn PHP. Check these forums, try browsing the API, and resources like hudzilla.org/phpwiki. Best of Luck.