Every major website seems to have a tag cloud. Users love tag clouds; they help navigate masses of content quickly and easily. [...] How do we actually build a tag cloud at application level? In this tutorial, I'll take you through putting together a full-blown, calculated web 2.0 tag cloud in PHP.

They start at the end, with an example cloud with some sample tags ("php" being the largest, of course). The code for it is pretty simple - it looks at an array of counts, the number of times the tag is used, and builds the links with the correct font size automatically.

Most web developers will usually like to determine the number of online users currently browsing their web site. Most tutorials will teach you how to do just that using a database of some sort because it is easy to implant. Using a database though can be a bit slow at times, especially if your web site gets a lot of hits. In this tutorial, we will teach you an alternative and effective way to determine the number of online users WITHOUT using a database.

They note the overhead that using a database can cause, and look instead to something PHP works with natively - sessions. Their code is contained inside of a function, checking the session path PHP uses for session files that haven't expired yet.