Got Traffic? by Kevin Davies

Webs 4 Christ Web Hosting & Design has found this great article by Kevin Davies to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 600 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster resources area.


Here's what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.
But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that's rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.
How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some
ideas:
Content
People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.
Articles
Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.
Services
For example on my website Crossword Heaven
(http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.
Another example is a "recommend this site" service. That is you have a page on your site that people can use to recommend a website. People get to the page through a link on the website that they want to recommend.
Or how about a service that let's people "brand" images with some text?
Affiliate links
I like to think of affiliate links as "paid for" links.
Basically you're paying someone to link to your site. Do they work? Yes! You win because you only pay the affiliate when a sale is made (ok, there are exceptions) and the affiliate wins because they get paid.
eBooks
People love eBooks. Create an eBook with links to your site in it. The more popular the eBook is the more links back to your site you will get. Plus eBooks go hand in hand with affiliate programs.
Of course there are many more ideas than these. The thing is to think about ways of getting people linking to your site. It doesn't matter how crazy the idea sounds. In fact sometimes crazy is good. Remember all those times someone sent you a link to a wacky web site? Just think about how much traffic that website must get!
About the author:
Kevin Davies is the webmaster of Crossword Heaven
(http://www.crosswordheaven.com) - a site that lets you create and solve crosswords online. If you're a webmaster you can also link to crosswords. Crosswords are a great way to keep your visitors on your site and keep them returning.

Serialize this - Saving Objects in PHP by Kevin Davies

Webs 4 Christ Web Hosting & Design has found this great article by Kevin Davies to be useful. You can find this article, as well as over 600 other articles helpful to webmasters in our free webmaster resources area.


When building my website "Crossword Heaven" I came across a problem. I created a PHP object called "crossword" but needed to save the information in the object to a database. Now considering that this object contained a lot of information this was not an easy thing to do. Or was it?
The answer: serialize().
What the serialize() function does is take something like an array or object and converts it into a string that can be stored in a database. All I had to do so that I could save the crossword object is something like "serialize($crossword)."
Easy! Some words of warning though. If you're using a version of PHP less than version 4 watch out because only properties get saved, not methods.
Here's a peek at the actual code:
$data = addslashes(serialize($crossword)); $name=""; if(isset($xwordInfo['xword_name'])){ $name = $xwordInfo['xword_name']; } $today = date('Y-m-d H-i-s'); $sql = "INSERT INTO `xword` ( `xword_id` , `xword_obj` , `xword_name`, `xword_owner`, `xword_width`, `xword_height`,`xword_date`) VALUES ('', '" . $data . "', '$name', '$owner', '$width', '$height', '$today');";
And here's the SQL to create the table 'xword':
CREATE TABLE `xword` ( `xword_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `xword_obj` blob NOT NULL, `xword_name`
varchar(100) NOT NULL default '', `xword_owner` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '', `xword_width` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', `xword_height` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', `xword_date` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00', PRIMARY KEY
(`xword_id`) ) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
You'll see that I used the addSlashes() function. That's because when the crossword object was serialized it contained characters like double quotes. These had to be escaped before the crossword could be saved to the database.
Now having saved a crossword object to a database I had to have a way to get it back. Surely, if there was a method to serialize an object there had to be one to unserialize an object, right?
And yes, there is: unserialize().
As you'd expect, unserialize() works the same way as serialize(), but in the opposite direction. You give it some serialized data and it returns the thing that was serialized. To get the crossword back all I had to do was something like "unserialize($crosswordData)."
Here's a look at the code:
$xwordId = (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ? $xwordId :
addslashes($xwordId); $sql = "SELECT xword_id, xword_obj, xword_name, xword_age from w3b_xword where xword_id=$xwordId"; $result = parent::getSQL($sql); $row = parent::getRow($result);
if(parent::getNumRows($result)>0){ $crossword = unserialize($row['xword_obj']); }
And that's it. Obviously serialize() and unserialize() are pretty handy functions to have around. And in my case I couldn't do without them.
About the author:
Kevin Davies is the webmaster of Crossword Heaven
(http://www.crosswordheaven.com) - a site that lets you create and solve crosswords online. If you're a webmaster you can also link to crosswords. Crosswords are a great way to keep your visitors on your site and keep them returning.