matt glaman

Achievements seem to be popping up in every new web service. Why? Because achievements make you win the Internet. Okay, not really, but it does make your user feel more engaged into your web site. It gives the user a reason to use your site and do more things on your site. The best part is the achievements do not even need to be all that difficult.

Over at Business MBA, I found this awesome infographic labeled "Behind the Numbers" that breaks down some information about one of the largest companies out there, Google.

When developing web applications it is always wise to use the most up to date APIs and know when to scale back on certain functionality.

With the new wave of mobile devices being a major way to access the Internet, it has become possible to customize web applications based on a user's location - or create web applications based on user location.

Google+ has released a rough outline on their API for accessing data.  The Google+ API only allows for read-access to data, but this will still allow you to integrate a visitors social features around Google+.

Google just made it easy to link your Google+ profile to your blog or other articles. Simply ensure to put a link to your Google+ profile with a rel="author" tag.

<a rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/101530880977549569019/" title="Google+ Profile">

Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injections are some of the biggest security threats to a PHP application.  Every developer has different ways of preventing SQL Injections or malicious JavaScript from being inserted into the database.

If you plan on building a PHP application, you'll probably end up using cookies, especially if there are user accounts. Cookies will allow you to store specific data for a certain amount of time.

The easiest way to learn PHP is to be able to create and edit code and see instant results. When I was younger and learning I couldn't afford to have my own web server so I installed a WAMP environment - I also didn't have a spare machine laying around to toss Linux on.

Mailer is a PHP class to help provide easier use of the PHP mail() function and error support. In all other of my scripts using the mail() function I would have lines upon lines of code just to make sure every thing sent right and provide my own error checking.