Once, long before the Ajax and Web 2.0 era , there was a time we used HTML <center> for text-alignment and javascripts stunning alert() function for debugging our websites and applications. But times are changing. To develop high performance Web 2.0 'killer apps', we need more tools and better applications to create web applications based upon Javascript frameworks (such as prototype, jQuery, scriptaculous, moo tools etc.) feeded by PHP as a backend. Below I will sum up some free Firefox-extensions to build web applications quick, efficient and flawless. Ok, almost flawless then. (more...)

A few months ago I was assigned to a project where a company, while their new site was being developed, wanted to track the visitors on their website for marketing purposes. The only problem was that their current website was constructed with Frontpage a few years ago and consisted of hundreds of static HTML pages. Since I'm (very) lazy I was not planning to copy paste the whole thing, I figured out a way to include the GA code in every static html page.

First, I wrote a .htaccess file which rewrites all (including files in subdirs) .html and .htm pages to addgoogleanalytics.php:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html?$ addgoogleanalytics.php?file=$0

Wow, it that all? Yes it is. So helloworld.html will be rewrited to addgoogleanalytics.php?file=helloworld.html, and the user won't even notice. Now, take a look at addgoogleanalytics.php:

<?php
/* Open the given file and add the google analytics code */
$sData = file_get_contents($_GET['file']);
$sData = str_replace("</body>", "
<script src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js\" type=\"text/javascript\">
</script>
<script type=\"text/javascript\">
_uacct = \"UA-1808705-3\";
urchinTracker();
</script>
 
</body>", $sData);
echo $sData;
?>

Enjoy.

Ignition, takeoff, we're started! Enjoy!

-Will