July 2009

Use robots.txt Disallow directive to forbid spiders and search engine robots

1 Comment / Content / SEO Tips & Tutorials, Google Hacks, Cheats & Tips / By /

Just like .htaccess, robots.txt resides at the document root of your domain. It’s a text configuration file containing directives or rules any well behaved web spiders or search engine robots should respect. While you can use .htaccess to forcibly prohibit any visits (including those of human visitors) to a certain part of your site, robots.txt …

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Bulk Domain Name Availability Checker Tool to Batch Search Available Domains

4 Comments / Domains, Internet Tools / By /

Someone asks me via contact form how to check potentially hundreds of domains for availability at once, as it’d be a huge waste of time to check them one by one. For example, when you need to check if these 50 domain names are still register-able: californiainsurance.com, newyorkinsurance.com, virginiainsurance.com, … and so forth, you need …

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Instantly Boost SQL Query Efficiency of REGEXP or RLIKE by 2000%

4 Comments / SQL / MySQL Tips and Tutorials / By /

Naturally, using regular expressions for SELECT queries to check if certain text strings or text patterns are residing somewhere in large chunks of data is the most resource-intensive option and thus your last option. However it’s somehow unavoidable to practice regular expressions in the SQL queries for complicated patterns. For example, word boundaries are a …

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WordPress blog goes blank after editing and updating the theme files

WordPress How To / By /

Really weird but not unexpected at all. After trying to edit and update a theme file functions.php to override a native function of WordPress, get_search_form, inserting these lines at the end of functions.php of my theme: function get_search_form() { ?>test<?php } To see if the native get_search_form() function can be overriden. Turns out it can’t. …

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mysql command line character set option for importing SQL files encoded in UTF8

SQL / MySQL Tips and Tutorials / By /

For languages other than English, especially those in Asia such as Chinese, each character takes 2 bytes in storage and needs to be encoded in UTF8 or other encoding specifically designed for it. Normally, the command line mysql database importing command has no problem with English database SQL files that are encoded in ANSI or …

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Being simple as a bless for development cost

2 Comments / Business and Marketing, Programming Tips & Insights / By /

Usefulness is the king; and it doesn’t have to be complex. One of the premium rules of project management is to never add a feature without seeing any substantial demand for it. Whatever it is, any additional feature is a burden to the system and a cost of time, both growing exponentially. While many of …

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A few suggestions of good practices for accelerating PHP development

1 Comment / PHP Tips & Tutorials, Programming Tips & Insights / By /

The slow and steady may win, but the fast and steady dominate. The old saying of faster not always being better may go well in other fields, but not in the IT world of today. Faster is absolutely better. You should by all means try to improve yours or your team’s programming proficiency and accelerate …

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