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.

Search Engines

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.