Google AdWords Trying Out an Opportunities Tab

On Sunday, I went into AdWords to do a little keyword research. You've seen their keyword tool before. You just go into the campaign, click on the Tools button and you've got the keyword tool right up top. This didn't happen to me Sunday. In fact, I didn't see the Tools button at all. Sitting here confused, it took me quite a few seconds to recognize something I've never seen before, an Opportunities tab.

Read the article here

Hackers hit Twitter and Facebook

Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers.

Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded", according to the firms.

The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe.

Denial-of-service (DOS) attacks take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

The service was restored shortly after the blog post, but the companies have had to continue to fend off the attack.

Facebook said its service was reduced but not taken offline.

"No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users," spokeswoman Brandee Barker told the AFP news agency.

"We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."

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REPLACE Statement on MySQL

Many times we need to update a record but we might not know whether such a record exists or not. In traditional programming we usually check whether the record exists or not, then perfrom the appropriate query according to the result of the previous query. A very good example of such situatuion is where you need to update the ip of an user against an user id, but the id may or may not be present in the visits table, user_id being the primary key for the table visits.

An usual solution to the problem is something like this.

Code: Perl

my $user_id = 1000;
 my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
 my $stmt = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM visits WHERE user_id=?');
 $stmt->execute($user_id);

 if($stmt->rows) ## a entry for the page id exists, update the record
 {
     my $update_stmt = $db->prepare('UPDATE visits SET ip = ? WHERE user_id=?');
     $update_stmt->execute($ip,$user_id);
 }
 else ## no such id, insert a new entry with count 1
 {
     my $insert_stmt = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO visits VALUES(?,?)');
     $insert_stmt->execute($user_id,$ip);
 }

Code: PHP

$user_id = 1000;
 $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
 $res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM visits WHERE user_id=$user_id");

 if(mysql_num_rows($res)) // a entry for the page id exists, update the record
 {
     $result = mysql_query("UPDATE visits SET ip = '$ip' WHERE user_id=$user_id");
 }
 else // no such id, insert a new entry with count 1
 {
     $result = mysql_query("INSERT INTO visits VALUES('$user_id','$ip')");
 }

Enter: REPLACE

The REPLACE statement very similarly or exactly like INSERT statment, except for the fact that in case a record with the same primary key exists in the one that's going to be inserted then the old row is deleted before the new one is inserted. You need to have an unique index or a primary key to use REPLACE statment.

REPLACE is not part of the SQL standard, it's an useful extension by MySQL, I guess there are many other RDBMSs which have come up with similar extensions.

So, now that we have REPLACE, we can rewrite above code snippets in the following manner:

Code: Perl

my $user_id = 1000;
 my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
 my $stmt = $db->prepare('REPLACE INTO visits VALUES(?,?)');
 $stmt->execute($user_id,$ip);

Code: PHP

$user_id = 1000;
 $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
 $res = mysql_query("REPLACE INTO visits VALUES('$user_id','$ip')");

That's it, isn't that easier guys!!

Read more about REPLACE statement here, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replace.html

Alternative Approach

A forgotten or unknown feature among the masses is the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, it causes an UPDATE when a duplicate key error is encountered during an insert. The above code snippet again be re-written like this,

Code: Perl

my $user_id = 1000;
 my $ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'};
 my $stmt = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO visits VALUES (?,?)  ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ip=?');
 $stmt>execute($user_id,$ip,$ip);

Code: PHP

$user_id = 1000;
 $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
 $res = mysql_query("INSERT INTO visits VALUES ('$user_id','$ip')  ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ip='$ip'");

You can read more about this feature here, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...duplicate.html

Google Chrome 2.0 now available for download

If you're like me who's using Chrome for quite sometime now, then you'll be excited to know that they've released the Google Chrome 2.0, which boasts 20% increase in browser performance than Chrome 1. With it's simple design hides a technology sophisticatedly integrated to provide faster, safer and easier web browsing experience.

Download it now at google.com\chrome and see for yourself!

Tips on improving your site's page visit | page ranking | traffic

Hi! I have gathered some websites that explains you a lot of creative ways on how to improve your web site's page ranking and page visits. This is very crucial for online marketers and web designers alike if they wish to see their websites being found on search engines like google, yahoo and etcetera. Please find time to read these tips and start your way now to improving your website's statistics.

online marketing: http://www.addedbytes.com/online-marketing/online-marketing-for-beginners/

increase blog traffic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic

http://www.searchengineguide.com/tinu-abayomipaul/increase-traffic-to-your-blog-from-search-engines-the-top-5-tips.php

http://www.wikihow.com/Increase-Website-Traffic

http://www.selaplana.com/2009/01/28/how-to-increase-the-page-views-of-your-blog/

reputation management tips: http://www.moregoogletraffic.com/

http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_Increase_Website_Traffic

I hope this helps you!

13 Amazingly Rich Resources for Web Development - CSS | Web Layout | Javascripts | Colors

Free CSS templates

http://www.opendesigns.org/

Automatic generator of backend codes

www.webformfactory.com/

Provides over 500 layouts to use in planning and designing websites

http://www.layoutcookbook.com/

Formats and Optimizes your CSS

www.cleancss.com/

Dreamveawer color codes

http://www.mxstudio.com.br/Conteudos/Dreamweaver/Cores.htm

Easily create your buttons here

www.buttonator.com/

Fast and concise JavaScript Library

http://jquery.com/

Free CSS templates downloadable in .zip format

http://www.free-css-templates.com/

Rich variety of useful photoshop tutorials on creating web layouts

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/40-useful-photoshop-web-layout-tutorials/

Open source service that creates screenshots of your web design in different browsers

www.browsershots.org/

Very good list of patterns for your web layouts

http://www.welie.com/patterns/

Another great list of CSS Resource

www.otherworldvision.com/80-css-web-design-resources-the-killer-list

Your Photography Costs What!?

One of the essentials in organizing a wedding is finding a photographer, I recently had this urge to discover how come photo service cost so much... I mean from my point of view it's just a simple matter of pointing the cam and clicking, right? So what's the deal about it? Read Why Wedding Photos Can Be Expensive