Posts by Dani

You have to use an HTTP redirect to redirect the website visitor over to whatever website they go to to pay with their Bitcoins. Once they've done that, you can use the above PHP code to verify the payment went through properly, by passing in information about the supposed transaction, as well as your app's API key, into the API. Note that this is unique to this specific API.

You would integrate it into what you have above by removing lines 218/219 where you print out that registration was successful, and instead do an HTTP redirect to the Bitcoin payment gateway so the new user can pay. Then, you'd create a new PHP page with the confirmBitcoinPayment() code for the Bitcoin gateway to redirect to if the payment is successful. I'm not sure if that made sense.

I'm not sure if you have any interest in it, but you can check out DaniWeb's API as well.

Code should not be measured by how many lines it is or how short it is. Instead, it should be measured by how efficient the code is, how performant it is, how readable it is, and how compartmentalized it is (translating to how easy it is to maintain).

Oh, and you can really help the effort (it goes a long way!) by, each time you find a DaniWeb email sent to your junk folder, marking it as 'not junk'.

And if you never realized it was as big a problem as it is, for every visitor that arrives at DaniWeb from Google, Googlebot crawls an average of 5 daniweb.com pages.

It’s actually quite common for very small sites, with cheap hosting, but very high quality content, to have their servers overloaded by legitimate search bots, and unable to serve content to actual website visitors.

Google has sophisticated algorithms in place nowadays to ensure that they don’t overload servers, but nothing is perfect. That’s why they have the Crawl Rate tools and crawl delay directive in sitemap.xml files.

A lot of people pay their hosting companies for bandwidth and cpu usage. If a particular search engine bot spends a lot of time crawling your site, but it doesn’t send you a lot of visitors or customers, then it’s common to ban it. People see it as a waste of bandwidth, especially in cases where the website only makes money if a visitor purchases their product, and it’s not the type of site that typically gets search engine visitors turning into customers.

Another reason people ban search bots is when they don’t agree with their principles. For example, many people don’t like when Google shows an answer box at the top of its search results that directly answer the searcher’s question, instead of simply linking to the webpage containing the information. They see it as Google stealing their content. They spend a lot of money on staff writers and research, and only make money when visitors see their ads, but Google (and other search engines) give searchers access to their valuable content without the benefit of showing the searchers their ads as well. This has been a growing concern in the SEO community as it relates to ChatGPT and AI utilizing publisher’s content with no benefit to the publisher. All it does is cost the publisher bandwidth.

The database has been migrated to new servers. Testing attachments to make sure file permissions are set correctly ...

DaniWeb will be switching to new servers later today, and there is planned downtime of a couple of hours. Unfortunately, I don't have an easy way of putting the site into read-only mode. What will most likely happen is that we might lose a few hours of database content.

It sounds to me like you are bypassing the very nature of the world wide web, which is that it is an interconnected web of links pointing between and across websites. A long list of every known domain is going to be a lot of radio static + garbage to weed out.

Keep in mind, XML sitemap files can contain URLs for different domains (owned by the same Google search console account).

You can discover XML sitemap files by checking the robots.txt for a domain name. Sometimes, it's included there. If not, you will still want to be a good crawler and follow robots.txt directives (meaning, don't crawl any URLs disallowed in a domain's robots.txt file).

Web for mobile. No APP!!!

Disagree! Native apps give flexibility (push notifications, local storage, etc.) that simply can't be achieved with a responsive website.

For Apple the company used the free dev system from Apple.

Are you referring to Objective-C written using XCode?

Here, I can't pay w/bitcoin for anything I buy in a year.

By that logic, the Euro, GBP, and Swiss Franc (all of which are considered some of the strongest currencies in the world) are all scammy pyramid schemes because I can’t use them to pay for anything anywhere I have ever shopped in my life.

Sure, I could exchange them for USD, and then use the USD to buy stuff, but the exchange rate fluctuates. Sounds to me that’s exactly the same as being able to exchange Bitcoin for USD and having to deal with fluctuating exchange rates there as well.

Also, Microsoft, AT&T, and even Whole Foods accept Bitcoin, not to mention many mom and pop shops in my town. Plus my web hosting company down in Dallas, TX, which accepts Bitcoin at no extra charge but does charge a service fee to accept credit cards, along with many other of my business expenses, are all Bitcoin-friendly.

In the code from Stack Overflow, line 5 $list = $dom->getElementsByTagName("title"); says to fetch a list of elements that match the critera where <title>...</title> appears in the HTML. The same way there can be many <div>, or multiple <meta ...>, there can theoretically be multiple <title> too.

Line 6, if ($list->length > 0) says to check if there is at least one item in the list of elements.

Line 7, $title = $list->item(0)->textContent; says to look at item(0) aka the first item in the list, and then fetch its content.

Now if we look at the example you wrote, line 1 says to fetch a list of elements that have the <title> tag. Line 2 says to check if this list has at least 1 element in it. Line 5 says to loop through the list of <title> tags in the HTML page. Line 8 says, that for each <title> tag, get the attribute called title[0]. That doesn't make sense. Essentially, it would be looking for HTML code that looks like this: <title title[0]="Page Title"> which obviously doesn't make sense. Instead, if you want to modify your code, you would make line 8 look like this: echo 'Title: ' .$name = $tag->textContent; echo '<br>'; However, using a loop doesn't make much sense here because we can expect the page to only have one title tag in all of the HTML, so it's fine to just fetch the first (and probably only) occurrence with item(0).

and in fact no where I checked would take bitcoin or any digital coin as payment.

LOTS of places that I spend my money accept Bitcoin, including DaniWeb's hosting company, my largest monthly expense.

I would suspect that the quality of the image needs to be high resolution enough such that the text is legible and can be reasonably matched to a font that the OCR software can detect.

Adobe Acrobat is pretty good at being able to turn text from a scanned image (e.g. a contract) into something searchable and editable.

NFTs and Crypto are securities, not stocks.

That's fine, but that doesn't mean they are scammy pyramid schemes and anyone who gets themselves involved with them is either a scam artist or a victim.

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents
$html = file_get_contents($url);

$doc = new DOMDocument();

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.libxml-use-internal-errors.php
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtml.php
$doc->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_COMPACT|LIBXML_NOERROR|LIBXML_NOWARNING);

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.libxml-clear-errors.php
libxml_clear_errors();

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.getelementsbytagname.php
$meta_tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('meta');

// https://www.php.net/manual/en/domnodelist.item.php
if ($meta_tags->length > 0)
{
    // https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.domnodelist.php
    foreach ($meta_tags as $tag)
    {
        // https://www.php.net/manual/en/domnodelist.item.php
        echo $name = $tag->getAttribute('name'); echo '<br>';
        echo $content = $tag->getAttribute('content');  echo '<br>';
    }
}

So you guys proved my point. I would not consider the stock market a Ponzi scheme.

essentially worthless, aside from what someone is willing to pay for them

Sounds to me like stock certificates that don’t give dividends

Or just about any useless collectible.

I know people that made money on this pyramid scheme too. But they are out and won't go back in.

Haha, no the people I know (shoutout to one in particular who is a DaniWeb member) have had stable, reputable careers in the Bitcoin industry for 10+ years.

I know a handful of people who made a lot of money with Bitcoin.

Oh, and then for each $tag in the loop, you can do:

// e.g. name="robots" and content="noindex"
$name = $tag->getAttribute('name');
$content = $tag->getAttribute('content');

Also, thank you for a little history of your journey with PHP. I have been programming nearly my entire life, but I started with PHP about 22 years ago when I started DaniWeb using phpBB. I slowly started reading over all of the PHP code that powered it and made small changes and adjustments here and there to customize. Then, I switched to vBulletin, and started making smaller modifications there. Then larger modifications. Then, eventually vBulletin was sold and I needed to switch again, but this time I decided to take all that knowledge I had on how phpBB was written and how vBulletin was written, and write my own PHP-based forum platform from scratch.

So, if you do not mind, may I see how you yourself would write a very simple, concise code to extract the meta tags using DomDocu & simple html dom parsers ?

I would use DomDocument as it's built into PHP. However, in your code, you see you're loading an XML file (a sitemap or sitemap index file). Instead, I would do something like this:

// Initiate ability to manipulate the DOM and load that baby up
$doc = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc->loadHTML($html, LIBXML_COMPACT|LIBXML_NOERROR|LIBXML_NOWARNING);
libxml_clear_errors();

// Fetch all <meta> tags
$meta_tags = $doc->getElementsByTagName('meta');

if ($meta_tags->length > 0)
{
    foreach ($meta_tags as $tag)
    {
         // Do something ...   
    }

}

Now, how to write code to extract meta tags using DomDocument ?

The simple answer is that you can’t. At least not with the code you have supplied. This code inspects an XML sitemap index and pulls out different properties in the xml file. These files don’t contain meta tags. They aren’t HTML files.

All this hoopla around ChatGPT and AI got me thinking about voice search. Has anyone created a version of Siri that actually works? (And, no, Google Assistant and Alexa don't really count. Google Assistant has never answered a single thing for me.) What about Cortana now that Microsoft owns a stake in ChatGPT?

Use server-side rendering. This is a technique where as much of the HTML as possible is generated on the server-side, and delivered as a static HTML page. When an end-user loads the page, AJAX dynamically retrieves the full contents of the page, that may or may not be parsed by Googlebot.

Website architecture is important to navigation, and having a clear user-friendly navigation structure that makes it easy for users to understand what they are looking at in the grand scheme of your site. For example, the URL for this page is:

https://www.daniweb.com/programming/web-development/threads/540077/question-about-seo-architecture

and the breadcrumb navigation at the top of this page says:

Home > Programming Forum > Web Development Forum > Discussion / Question

Both of those things give the end-user quick clues to how the site is structured and organized, and what else they might find on the site. So at the end of the day, yes, you can put anything anywhere on a website, but the goal is to optimize the end-user's experience. So organize things in the best way to make that possible :)

None that I personally know of, as this is so far out of my wheelhouse. Do you do dropshipping? What types of products do you sell in your store? Unique products you make yourself or dropshipped?

That won't work if the value of $lmt or $offset is invalid. (Or $tbl, etc. for that matter)

I’m not sure what OFFSET 0 is. You can just leave that out. If you want to start at an offset of 10 or something, you would do LIMIT 10, 100.

The odds of what happening, exactly?

He wants all the values that don't contain point, so it would be the opposite:

foreach($test as $v){
    if (strpos($v, '_point') === false) {
        echo $v;
    }
}

Hi there and welcome! Thank you so much for joining.

Google has officially stated that they take all content at face value when evaluating its quality, regardless of if it was generated by AI or not. It's also common knowledge that, at this time, at least, Google doesn't have the capability of accurately determining what is, and what isn't, AI generated content. As rproffitt pointed out, all the existing AI detection tools absolutely suck.

However, off the record, Google has been very vocal in the SEO community saying that AI generated content, bundled together with spun content, is pretty much always considered extremely low quality, and will hurt SEO.

Keep in mind, Google does factor authorship into determining the trustworthiness of an article. They want to send Google searchers to articles and resources written by experienced experts with first-hand knowledge of the subject matter. AI generated content, as impressive as it is, is only capable of collating facts that already exist on the web. Google already has access to those facts as well. The articles containing those facts are, most likely, already ranking in Google, and were most likely written by subject matter experts. If you want to rank above what's already out there, it needs to be a unique perspective, a new first-hand perspective, an innovative take on the subject matter, etc., and that is something that something without a "soul" doesn't have the capacity to write.

Instead of:

if($match == 'exact')
{
    $sql_count = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] = ?";
    $sql = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] = ?";
    for($i=1;$i!==$table_columns_number;$i++)
    {
        $sql_count .= " OR $col_[$i] = ?";
        $sql .= " OR $col_[$i] = ?";
    }
    $sql .= " OR $col_[$i] = ?";
}
else
{
    $sql_count = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] LIKE ?";
    $sql = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] LIKE ?";
    for($i=1;$i!==$table_columns_number;$i++)
    {
        $sql_count .= " OR $col_[$i] LIKE ?";
        $sql .= " OR $col_[$i] LIKE ?";
    }
    $sql .= " ORDER BY DESC LIMIT $limit OFFSET $offset";
}

you should be able to do:

$char = (($match == 'exact') ? '=' : 'LIKE');

$sql_count = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] $char ?";
$sql = "SELECT * from $table WHERE $col_[0] $char ?";
for($i=1;$i!==$table_columns_number;$i++)
{
    $sql_count .= " OR $col_[$i] $char ?";
    $sql .= " OR $col_[$i] = ?";
}

switch ($match)
{
    case 'exact':
        $sql .= " OR $col_[$i] $char ?";
        break;
    default:
        $sql .= " ORDER BY DESC LIMIT $limit OFFSET $offset";
}

Hi there and welcome to DaniWeb! Good luck with your continued studies, and I look forward to your writing contributions.

There was a March 2023 broad core update that started mid-March and took a couple of weeks to roll out. No specific data has been announced, or seemingly discovered by the SEO community, specifically what this core update targeted, if anything. It seemed like just another core update that takes Penguin, Panda, etc. into consideration.

There has since also been a Reviews Update that started rolling out today, I believe. It targets product and service reviews e.g. content written to provide a recommendation, opinion, or analysis of a product or service. I think it's still too early to see the kind of impact that this algorithm update is making.

Yes, I think AI can do a lot of PPC marketing and SEO grunt work (e.g. keyword research) that would typically be outsourced overseas.

How is putting your products on Amazon a challenge?

I think you can sell direct to consumer with your own eCommerce store, but additionally selling through Amazon is a great way to make yourself available and market yourself to a wider audience who otherwise wouldn’t have found you.

It also eliminates a lot of the hassle of dealing with your own eCommerce shop in terms of handling credit card processing, etc. Of course, you want to be able to sell direct as well so you don’t have to give Amazon such a hefty cut.

Hello there! Nice to virtually meet you.

Break down your ad groups and ads to be super niche and super targeted.

Can you provide the code for simplehtmldom_1_9_1/simple_html_dom.php?

If you are getting blank pages, it’s because of a PHP fatal error. Sorry, I’m not near a computer right now and I might not be until tomorrow afternoon.

Hi there and welcome! What topics interest you?

Oh, also, I went ahead and tested for compatibility with ?disallow_webview=true and it still worked. Should I just ignore the email?

Be sure to look up some web site such as "Web 3.0 is Going Great" to find the cesspool of scams and ripoffs.

That looks like a pretty crappy "news" site? Why are you bring it up? What does it have to do with Web3 or SEO?

Checking Distrowatch and the only one in the top 5 that I recognize is Mint. Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian are all lower down nowadays. Who woulda thunk. I guess I'm a dinosaur here?

I used to use RedHat 4 back in the day. Then 5, then 7.

I currently have two LG 5K monitors. One works fine with no issues. The other fails to turn on at least 10% of the time when bringing my macOS (2021-generation M1 Max) laptop out of sleep. Now the latest issue, that happened twice this week, is the keyboard that is connected to one of its USB ports just randomly stops working. Every time it glitches, the only way to fix it is to physically unplug the monitor's power cable from the outlet. Disconnecting and reconnecting from/to the laptop doesn't work, nor does turning the laptop off and then back on, or switching inputs.

Truth be told, and you will really adore this, is you messaged me earlier today asking if I tried ChatGPT-4 yet. So I asked ChatGPT what a good question for a hardware forum would be, and it suggested I ask what are some reliable brands for computer monitors. It turned out that I had just, moments earlier, had my keyboard randomly stop working and was still cursing my monitor, so I decided I'd ask the question.

As I have no experience with phpSpreadsheet, any advice I offer would be the blind leading the blind. However, they do have official documentation here which includes this simple demo (copied and pasted from that page):

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Spreadsheet;
use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Xlsx;

$spreadsheet = new Spreadsheet();
$activeWorksheet = $spreadsheet->getActiveSheet();
$activeWorksheet->setCellValue('A1', 'Hello World !');

$writer = new Xlsx($spreadsheet);
$writer->save('hello world.xlsx');

It seems pretty feature rich, but I wonder if it's overkill for your needs. Is there a reason that the CSV format wouldn't work for you?

Sorry you had such a poor experience. I have always been a Windows gal (specifically, Dell) for work, with an iMac at home. Then, when I moved to Palo Alto from NY, everyone, and I mean everyone had a mac laptop. I got one as well because I was looking for a lightweight laptop I could bring to coffee shops to work. It ended up being a horrible, horrible experience. I think there was something wrong with the video card and Apple was unable to diagnose it properly. I have no idea. But it was a horrible experience.

I started dating Ziv, and he tried to help me with it, but we never really properly figured out what was wrong with it. Then, when Apple released their Macbook Pro line with the M1 chip, Ziv really wanted me to get it, so that's what I use now with no issues.

I still have my Dell, but it's now nearing a decade old, and while it has absolutely amazing specs even by today's standards, it doesn't support TPM and therefore can't run Windows 11. Here's a picture of it from way back in 2014: https://twitter.com/DaniWeb/status/442061151346909185

So sorry for the triple posts! I also just want to clarify that this method lets you send a comma-delimited text file to the web browser for downloading, which can easily be opened by any version of Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet program. It does not write an Excel file, specifically. For that, there are a handful of third-party PHP libraries for creating Excel files. Here is a link to one of them, PHPSpreadsheet.

If there is a javascript parse error in a different (unrelated) section of your code, it could prevent any javascript on your page from working.

Do you now get any javascript console errors?