Many people have asked me how best to share a calendar between colleagues, between friends, husband and wife, offices in different locations, and some other cases where coordinating schedules is useful.

One solution that many are turning to is Google Calendar, which is a fantastic solution. It offers many features, including the ability to subscribe to your calendars from desktop applications. If your software supports iCal, you can subscribe to your Google Calendar by clicking on the calendar under My Calendars, and choosing Settings. In the window that appears, make sure that the Calendar Details tab is selected. At the bottom, you will see several buttons, one of which displays “ical” – there is a button for both “public” and “private”, which will show only your public events or all events (both public and private). Copy and paste the URL from this button into your calendar application.
Read more

Many of us use MySQL to power our websites. Using a database is necessary for many common applications like Wordpress, Joomla, and phpBB due to the amount of information which they serve. A database backend is a natural choice for a website which becomes more complex as it allows for a more efficient storage and organization of data as well as an easy way to retrieve and serve content.

Information inside a typical MySQL database is stored in tables. Information is retrieved by querying these tables, usually with some criteria so that we receive only the information which we want. In order to fulfill a query and return the right information, MySQL must examine all rows in the tables and see which one’s match our criteria. This can be a resource intensive process which can slow down a website’s performance depending on the amount of data which must be examined.

MySQL has a great feature which can help speed up queries. Enter table indexes.
Read more

Is your site too plain? Do you want to add a bit of spark or flair to the visual appearance of your site? Maybe you’re looking for some creative ways to work with menus or display contextual information. Perhaps pop-up blockers have made you rethink how to design your site, but you dislike constant page reloads as visitors navigate your site, and you’re looking for a solution.

All of these concerns can be addressed by using JavaScript to make your site more dynamic, inviting, and engaging.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to two tools that can help you transform a plain site into a modern, good-looking and engaging site. The disadvantage, which I’ll tell you up front, is that your visitor must have a JavaScript-capable browser. This does rule out some older mobile browsers, but even mobile devices are becoming more widely JavaScript capable (e.g., Opera Mini).
Read more

Most websites fall into two basic categories: informative and sales. Regardless of which category your site falls into, the more traffic you can get to your site, the better off you are. One of the best ways to get more traffic to your site is to make it more interesting for users.

Because of the great interest most people have in expressing their opinions about information and products, as well as being able to find other peoples’ opinions, or even just asking simple questions, setting up the ability for users to do so is a great way of attracting more traffic to your site. This can easily be done by setting up forums or a blog. Both forums and blogs give users of your site the opportunity to ask questions, post their opinions, and see what other users have to say about the products and information on your site.

Forum software, such as phpBB, and blogging software, such as WordPress and b2Evolution, is offered as part of most hosting packages to help you in getting this set up. Each application boasts different features to allow you to set up your blog or forum in the way that best suits your needs.

We encourage those of you who are looking to increase the interest your site generates to add a blog or forum to your site to help in getting more people interested and active in using your site.