This article gives you a bit of exposure to Python. It assumes that you have no knowledge of that programming language, so some of what you read here might seem a bit basic. It focuses on comparing and contrasting Python with PHP — not because one language is better than the other but because of a simple truth: It's often easier to learn new things by referring back to something you already know.

The goal of this article is simple: to give you a quick working knowledge of Python in the hope that you'll dig a little further on your own. With luck, you'll see that Python isn't really that different from what you're used to. To extend the travel metaphor, you aren't really going to a distant foreign land, just the country next door where everyone speaks the same language as you.

Understanding Google Base feeds

Before you start to develop applications with Google Base, you need to understand how it works. As with all REST-based services, things get rolling with an HTTP request to a designated resource. This HTTP request contains a query with one or more input parameters; the server replies to the query with an Atom feed, suitable for parsing in any XML-aware client.

To see how this works, try accessing the URL in your favourite Web browser:

http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets?
    bq=product+manager[itemtype:jobs][location:CA]

In order to make sure that your website is always available to the public, you have to monitor it. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can easily create a monitoring script that will check your website availability and send an email or sms alert to you if it isn’t.

Redirect 301 with htaccess

In my opinion htaccess is the best and quickly way to redirect your pages. Only an advice: you need to have a base knowledge of htaccess for use it or you risk to have some serious problems on your site! So, before start using htaccess, I suggest you some good reading: Complete guide to htaccess for Beginners and Htaccess tutorials on apache.org.

Here is an example of htaccess usage:

Redirect permanent http://mysite.com 
http://www.mysite.com

Now supposed you have the following two URLs: http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com. For Google, for example, these URLs are two different pages and their page rank will be divided among two pages. So, why not using htaccess to redirect all traffic to only one page?

The only thing you have to do is to create a new file called .htaccess with the following code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^mysite\.com [NC]
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

Here are some of our step-by-step notes and drafts from a concept exercise on behalf of a well-known charity. The goal was to create a screen that encourages more site visitors to give, and give larger amounts.

We don’t know if these ideas will ultimately be used, but they illustrate ways of evolving the user experience in a way that should increase the amount of money collected.

The starting point

(Disclaimer: we combined two screens in to one to have a truly poor starting point for the exercise.)

The centre of the donations page has the words “Charge me” followed by one drop-down menu with well over fifty options starting at $2.00 increasing by one dollar up to $30 and then in larger increments up to the $1000 mark. The second menu has only one option: zero cents.

I like “NoSQL”. But at Flickr, MySQL is our hammer, and we use it for nearly everything. It’s our federated data store, our key-value store, and our document store. We’ve built an event queue, and a job server on top of it, a stats feature, and a data warehouse.

We’ve spent the last several years abusing, twisting, and generally mis-using MySQL in ways that could only be called “post relational”. Our founding architect is famously in print saying, “Normalization is for sissies.”

If real farming was as comforting as it is in Zynga's mega-hit Farmville then my family would have probably never left those harsh North Dakota winters. None of the scary bedtime stories my Grandma used to tell about farming are true in FarmVille. Farmers make money, plants grow, and animals never visit the red barn. I guess it's just that keep-your-shoes-clean back-to-the-land charm that has helped make FarmVille the "largest game in the world" in such an astonishingly short time.

How did FarmVille scale a web application to handle 75 million players a month? Fortunately FarmVille's Luke Rajlich has agreed to let us in on a few their challenges and secrets. Here's what Luke has to say...

CakePHP

CakePHP is one of the most widely used rapid development framework for PHP. It provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.

What is gMap?

gMap is a lightweight jQuery plugin that helps you embed Google Maps into your website. With only 2 KB in size it is very flexible and highly customizable.

Example
This tiny line of code is being used to embed the map below. Simple, isn't it?

$("#map").gMap();

Kartendaten ©2010 Europa Technologies - Nutzungsbedingungen

Karte

Satellit

Labels anzeigen

Gelände

2000 Meilen

2000 km

Decompilers are a real worry for people who create Flash content. You can put a lot of effort into creating the best game out there, then someone can steal it, replace the logo and put it on their site without asking you. How? Using a Flash Decompiler. Unless you put some protection over your SWF it can be decompiled with a push of a button and the decompiler will output readable source code.

In this tutorial I will demonstrate a technique I use to protect code and assets from theft.