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In the world of web development and search engine optimisation you find this topic is frequently discussed, yet often without any reasoning or conclusion. Therefore the purpose of this article is to investigate why.

So, let’s start at the very beginning, and find out what “word separators” actually are, and why we need them in URLs.

Traditionally a word separator is a space, yes, an every day space you create with your space-bar key.

The problem with using spaces in URLs is that when the URL is utilised in a browser (for example), the URL is encoded using percent encoding which causes spaces to appear as the encoded “%20″, resulting in an ugly URL formation which is humanly difficult to read.

ie: http://www.example.com/percent%20encoding

How do we overcome the problem? Over the years a workaround has developed…

…the dash, no the hyphen, no in fact it’s the minus sign (yes, I mean this “-” symbol)…

ie: http://www.example.com/not-percent-encoding

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I need to transfer a bunch of domains from Godaddy (aka Godamnannoying) to TuCows (aka OpenSRS), surly it can’t be that difficult? Right?

I found that there were lots of articles on how to transfer to Godaddy, but not how to get out. This is a short guide on how to transfer away from Godaddy, in this case we will be transferring to OpenSRS.

This guide is appropriate for .com, .net, .org, .name domain names.

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Recently I come across a claim by Network Solutions stating:

Did you know? Registering a domain name for a longer term not only saves you money, but helps to increase your search engine ranking. Consider a 5-year term!

Why it works: Search engines perceive domain names registered for 5 years or longer to be more legitimate than domain names registered for a shorter term, and therefore rank them more highly.

Source

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What is the PHPbase web framework?

PHPbase web framework (also known as PHPBase 0.0.1) is a PHP based frame work library for building websites, originally written in 2003.

Note: This framework is old, very old, dating back to 2003, however it does work in php4, for php5 I recommend ezcomponents, also take a look at symfony, however this is not as highly rated, also check pear.

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Often clients ask me to create a function where by a visitor can come onto their website, there they can enter in their postcode, the idea is to then display the closest location based on locations in a database.

Aim: To display details of a predefined location that is closest to the visitor based on the postcode they enter.

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I want to create a facebook application, however currently all my production servers run PHP4.

Ultimately the project will be appear on your Facebook profile as a profile box.

I’m writing this while I begin creating my facebook application to assist people in a similar situation to myself.

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This is something that people don’t seem to realise, and although I tell them over and over it seems to go ignored.

DO NOT PUT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS ON YOUR WEBSITE

The reason is that spam bots crawl websites and gather email addresses, then place them into a list ready to spam.

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I have been using PHP for a long time now, it’s a very flexible language, and is a good platform.

Over the years PHP coders have gotten a very bad reputation mainly due to poor coding and not escaping SQL.

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OpensSRS is a domain reseller system offered by Tucows to internet service providers.

Although Tucows offers a very flexible system, there’s a serious lack of easy to follow documentation.

This document will explain how to get your tucows opensrs reseller account up and running with full access.

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The idea was to have the ability to create unlimited subdomains simply by creating an appropreate directory for it in your html root directory.

Since most people don’t have direct access to their httpd.conf, the obvious solution was to create a method using mod_rewrite within “.htaccess”. This also allowed it to be setup very easily and quickly.

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