There's a lot to learn on a week-long PHP course - especially if you're new to programming. And delegates need practice during and after the course with some relatively straightforward (but rewarding) real applications. One of the things that we do ourselves is to analyse server log files - allowing for us to research and learn from the traffic arriving at out web site. Such data and feedback is important when you're considering search engine placement, and it's a rewarding application to write too as a short piece of code can tell you a very great deal. In the past, you might have used
analog or
AWStats for analysis like these. Nowadays many people use
Google Analytics but some elements there have become paying services, and a "do it yourself" approach does let you fine tune at the grass roots too.
I've added two demonstrations to our web site from today. The first counts the number of accesses to each page in a log file, and reports on the 10 most visited - source code
[here].
The second also shows
reglar expressions and
associative arrays, but I have extended it to look at the search terms used and report on each of those for the most arrived-at three pages. That's done using an array of arrays (you may consider that to be a two dimensional array if you wish, but really it isn't). And the source is commented - see
[here]. You can also run that code (and it will look at accesses from 03:30 until the current time - live data)
[here].
As ever, the really useful information can come in the trimmings, and I've added a link from each of the arrival pages into this last demo so that it forms a really useful too for your SEO team ... not bad for something written on the penultimate day of your first programming course!
Next PHP course - February 2012. Some places remain. Whether you're reading this article in time for the February course, or not, you can find full details of all our PHP courses and upcoming dates
[here]. Courses are taught interactively so that you don't just see the programs - you see how they're developed too, and groups are limited to eight delegates to make sure that everyone gets plenty of help and tutor time if they need it. We even have our own hotel rooms if you're coming from a distance so you can stay with us!
(written 2011-12-01, updated 2011-12-03)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[422] PHP Magic Quotes - (2005-08-22)
[463] Splitting the difference - (2005-10-13)
[493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
[558] Converting between acres and hectares - (2006-01-08)
[560] The fencepost problem - (2006-01-10)
[574] PHP - dividing a string up into pieces - (2006-01-23)
[589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
[608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
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[716] Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files - (2006-05-10)
[728] Looking ahead and behind in a Regular Expression - (2006-05-22)
[1008] Date conversion - PHP - (2006-12-26)
[1058] PHP Regular expression to extrtact link and text - (2007-01-31)
[1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
[1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
[1372] A taster PHP expression ... - (2007-09-30)
[1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
[1603] Do not SHOUT and do not whisper - (2008-04-06)
[1613] Regular expression for 6 digits OR 25 digits - (2008-04-16)
[1799] Regular Expressions in PHP - (2008-09-16)
[2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
[2165] Making Regular Expressions easy to read and maintain - (2009-05-10)
[2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
[2629] Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP - (2010-02-09)
[3020] Handling (expanding) tabs in PHP - (2010-10-29)
[3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
[3515] PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions - (2011-11-11)
[3516] Regular Expression modifiers in PHP - summary table - (2011-11-12)
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[3789] More than just matching with a regular expression in PHP - (2012-06-30)
[3790] Solution looking for a problem? Lookahead and Lookbehind - (2012-06-30)
[4071] Setting up strings in PHP - (2013-04-27)
[4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)
H106 - PHP - Arrays [409] Functions and commands with dangerous names - (2005-08-11)
[603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
[773] Breaking bread - (2006-06-22)
[832] Displaying data at 5 items per line on a web page - (2006-08-14)
[1116] PHP adding arrays / summing arrays - (2007-03-23)
[1199] Testing for one of a list of values. - (2007-05-22)
[1451] More PHP sample and demonstration programs - (2007-12-01)
[1614] When an array is not an array - (2008-04-17)
[2215] If nothing, make it nothing. - (2009-06-02)
[2274] PHP preg functions - examples and comparision - (2009-07-08)
[2915] Looking up a value by key - associative arrays / Hashes / Dictionaries - (2010-08-11)
[2920] Sorting - naturally, or into a different order - (2010-08-14)
[3004] Increment operators for counting - Perl, PHP, C and others - (2010-10-18)
[3379] Sorting data the way YOU want it sorted - (2011-08-05)
[4068] Arrays in PHP - contain different and even mixed data types - (2013-04-24)
[4244] Disambiguation - PHP List - (2014-03-07)
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