SQL Optimization

SQL or Structured Query Language has been the standard protocol of most Relational Database Systems of the past decades. It runs the backbone of practically the whole Internet as all the major database systems (Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, etc…) utilizes it. As such it is a critical language to know for web programmers. A very basic knowledge of SQL can help even the most novice programmer to start developing simple web or software applications such as Blogs, Web Stores, Dynamic Websites and others. With the large computing power available to us even in the simplest web hosting servers, it is oftentimes neglected that our Database design and queries are optimized for the fastest possible performance. However, when we are dealing with tens of thousands of website visitors or hundreds of thousands of database entries, SQL optimization is a must. The following presentation discusses simple SQL optimization techniques that can greatly improve your software or web application’s performance. SQL Optimization

Facebook Likes/Shares Checker for a Webpage

Facebook integration is by now ‘a must’ for websites. By providing tools to share or like your site to Facebook, it gives your site a lot more opportunity to get read and seen by the 500 million ++ users of Facebook. Facebook has developed several simple to use API’s for this which can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web. Statistics can be monitored in http://www.facebook.com/insights, however the data presented is far from complete. For example, something as simple as monitoring how many people has “shared” or “liked” your website is not easily determined. Fortunately there’s a handy link for checking the number of Facebook “likes” or “shares” of a given Web Page URL also provided by Facebook but not as known: http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.eacomm.com The above query will return an XML document in the following format: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <links_getStats_response xmlns=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/1.0/facebook.xsd” list=”true”> <link_stat> <url>http://www.eacomm.com</url> <share_count>3</share_count> <like_count>3</like_count> <comment_count>13</comment_count> <total_count>19</total_count> <click_count>0</click_count> <normalized_url>http://www.eacomm.com/</normalized_url> </link_stat> </links_getStats_response> This can then be parsed by a simple application to store the statistics in a database. For example in PHP you can use the simlexml_load_file to parse this. Below is a very simple code (admittedly not very elegant, but it works) to do this: $url = “http://www.eacomm.com”; $xml = simplexml_load_file(“http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=$url”); $child=$xml->children(); $child2=$child->children(); $shares=$child2->share_count; $likes=$child2->like_count; $comments=$child2->comment_count; $total=$child2->total_count; $clicks=$child2->click_count; You can now store the shares, likes, etc. in a database and monitor for yourself how your website is performing in Facebook. Below is a form to check if your site has been ‘shared’ in Facebook: http://www.eacomm.com/fblikecheck.php Facebook Likes/Shares Checker: Enter the Web Page you want to check:

DO-CMS Community Edition Version 3.03 Released

Major update of DO-CMS Community Edition that includes: 1. Clean URLs – Default support for SEO friendly URL’s. 2. Upgraded Newsletter Engine – Now includes reports and statistics on newsletters sent out (how many people read it, what links were clicked, etc…) 3. Integrated user’s manual – the User’s Manual can now be viewed from the CMS panel. 4. Contact Us Database – CMS Database of visitors who used the contact us page of the website. 5. Fixed some minor bugs and stability issues. Download it now at http://sourceforge.net/projects/do-cms DO-CMS Community Edition is the open source version of DO-CMS, EACOMM Corporation‘s award-winning website content management system.