I use this technique to show the most popular posts on our homepage, and although this isn’t a core feature in WordPress, it’s not all that hard to do. All it takes is a little PHP and a single edit to one of your WordPress template files.

Though not necessary, running PHP on your home machine can make development much quicker and easier. Without affecting the actual website, you can edit files and execute them locally, uploading all to the server when finished. This article will cover the installation of Apache and configuration of PHP on your local Windows machine.

Encrypting sensitive data is extremely important. You, as the webmaster or database administrator, needs to make sure that the data is safe, even if it falls in the wrong hands. In this article, I will show you how to use MD5 and SHA1 encryption in PHP.

There are very few websites in existence that do not allow, for whatever function, uploading files via the browser. Whether for forum avatars, a gallery script, or even a school project, websites across the World Wide Web employ a myriad of upload scripts, including the ever-popular MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. With this script and step-by-step [...]

RSS Feeds are a great way to keep up with the latest news and blog sites, but we can also use them to bring data into our PHP applications. In this article, I will show you how to load any RSS feed into variables that you can manage in PHP.

Including up-to-date radar images on your website is easier than you might think. In this article, I am going to share where you can get radar images for free for US radar sites and even share some sample code that will fetch the closest radar site by lat/lon and display it on your website.

Pie chart, circle graph, call it what you want, but these charts are loved by descriptive statisticians across the world for their instant appeal to the viewer’s eyes and inferential mind.  Though descriptive statistics can be deceiving, pie charts, created in this article with the GD library, easily describe the data in a very literal [...]

An IP address used to mean nothing to us, other than where they are in the cyber world, but it is now possible to find out where they are in the real world, using databases that are freely available. In this article, I will disclose where you can get a free database that will tell [...]

Better recognized perhaps as “bar graphs” to most people, in the world of statistics, histograms provide a graphic representation of a set of data.  This graph can be used to make inferences about the data and draw conclusions about the sample and population.  In this article, we’ll dive into a few new functions available as [...]

There are times where a PHP script needs to fetch the HTML from a remote page, or even post some data to a remote location. Learning how to use cURL or fsockopen() can be time consuming and unnecessary. There is a nice PHP class called Snoopy that can take care of all these functions very [...]