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www.wimb.net - Server Stuff





On this page:

ftp

stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is used to transfer web pages from a PC to a web site. My favorite one is WS_FTP95 LE but there are many others like Total Commander, a Swiss product. This is a file manager with built-in FTP facility.

WARNING: when after a upload something is not working, for example some images are not visible, then, in most cases it is a "case" problem. Unix and Linux servers are handling filenames in a case sensitive matter. For example; my_image.gif is not the same as my_image.GIF The best is to use only lowercase filenames.

Webstats

Once when a site is up and running, the question of "How many visitors were there today and where do they come from" comes up. Of course for a php expert this is a "peace of cake", make everything yourself. However, there are also may companies who offers a web statistic service. My favorite one was NedStat, but since they put popup windows in their code, I removed it. The best is to look for Free Web Stat on Google.

Besides this kind of statistics, most web hosters offers also their own statistics like Webalizer. Here is an example of such a report.

There are two types of search engines, the one like Google and the one to search only your own site. To make that a site can be found by Google, the site must be submitted to Google. More about this, yes, on Google.

For searching a locally on a site there are several solutions:

External Search
Like Atomz, which is now a part of WebSideStory, is a good one. Their service is very good and the Atomz Express Search for is free for small sites, up to 500 pages. Also Google has a similar service that can be combined with their Adsense system.
"Internal" Search
This means that the search software is on your own site. A good example is Sphider - a lightweight search engine in PHP. It is complete with all source codes and you can tune it to your site as you want.

Your web server on your PC

For test php programs it is very convenient to have a local server. Then there is no need to do a file upload after each very small program change. Just edit the php file, go to the browser window and refresh the screen. (Ctrl F5, or F5 for Internet Explorer)

Needed is a computer with:

  • A web server, like Apache
  • PHP interpreter
  • MySQL Database

On computers with Linux these programs are more or less standard. For a Windows PC one of the following programs (there are many more) can be used:

  • Easy PHP
    EasyPHP is a complete software package allowing to use all the power and the flexibility that offers the dynamic language PHP and the efficient use of databases. Package includes an Apache server, a MySQL database, a fully PHP execution, as well as easy development tools for your web site or your applications.
  • PHPdev
    phpdev is a pre configured suite of all the bits and pieces you need to get Apache/PHP/MySQL/other running on your machine. It is not invasive and does not alter any windows settings or touch the registry etc.







Making Money with your WebSite

Now your website is up and running, how can you make some money with it? There are two main for making money with a website:

  1. Selling Something
  2. Advertising

Here I will limit to "Advertising". At my opinion, advertising is the most simple way to make some (little) money with your site.
On this site two programs are used:

  1. Google Adsense
  2. Zanox

Google Adsense works with page depending ads, the content ad is determined after the page is automatically evaluated. Several examples can be seen on this page.

Zanox has a manual selection of the ads. On their web site a list of advertisers can be found and if you like, you can place the corresponding code in your web page. See the example on the right. Because of the Zanox ads did me not bring any money, I replaced them with Google Adsense.

Google Adsense works very fine on most pages, but gives sometimes strange result on pages with little text; with Zanox you can exactly select the ad you want to show to your visitors.

There are many more. Your selection depends of many things, like: language of the site, visitors profiles etc. Here a link to a site specialized in this stuff.



PID: 7015 CLT: 0.002 LMD: 2013-Aug-17

Updated 2007 Oct. 09