A couple of weeks back I had to write a solution for a client to track the referrer search engine from where the user came to his sites contact page, without using Google Analytics. If a user was to fill the contact form on the website, the referring search engine name and the keyword for which it was refereed was to be emailed along with the contact information. The following is a solution for the same.

The code itself is pretty simple - it checks the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] and, based on an array of search engine types, looks for a certain "query" keyname in the URL and matches what follows (with a regular expression). This can be useful for not only determining what sort of audience is visiting your site, but could also be used to present a custom message to visitors from certain search engines (or, more complicated, to show different content based on search terms).

If you're running PHP 5.3 and you have to use pesky old code that uses long class prefixes (yea, so, pretty much all PHP code out there), you can still make use of namespace features to shorten them.

He includes a quick example that shows the shift from using the traditional Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_AutoComplete_Abstract to an aliasing with the use/as to just reference it as AutoComplete.

In the second part of the series they build on the basics and look at importing namespaces into a script, aliasing them to a shorter, easier to use name and some rules to consider about name resolution.

The third part of the series (the last part) looks at the keywords the namespace functionality uses and how to autoload namespaced classes to keep their namespacing intact.

Deciding on the best method of spam prevention on your blogs, forums, or even contact forms can be difficult. In this article we will take a look at a service called Akismet and how it can help. We will also look at why some other methods of fighting spam fail.

They give a few ways to waylay the spammers including:

• Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions
• Keyword Blacklist
• CAPTCHA
• and a service called Akismet

They go into a bit more detail on this last one, even going so far as to included code (this class) and examples of how to let the Akismet service see if something is spam or not. Links to libraries for other languages are included too.

With PHP 5.3 coming up on the horizon, I'm of course looking forward to using namespaces.

He gives an example of how useful these namespaces can be for you and your code, but points out one failing point - trying to define classes in a namespace that are named the same as a built-in keyword for PHP. There's already been a suggestion to add a captial "I" in front of the class name to prevent this collision.

There's also the problem of throwing custom exceptions - unless you use the namespace properly your script will just throw a default exception.

The YouTube video sharing site allows Web application developers to access public content through its REST-based developer API. [...] This article introduces the YouTube Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated video content; access video metadata, comments and responses; and perform keyword searches.

They help you get started by outlining the format that the YouTube messages use (Atom feeds) and how to run a query against the API and return back the custom data for things like video categories, popularity and the results of keyword searches.

Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords.

Though not too meaningful, it is interesting to see how the different languages stack up in the number of reserved words you can't use for anything else. So, does that mean that Perl is the list limiting?

There are plenty of good reasons why PHP 5 works this way and it seems that in PHP 6 the static keyword will be able to be used in place of self to get the dynamic behavior a lot of folks are looking for. [...] All well and good once PHP 6 is done.

In the meantime, I was noodling around with runkit and came up with some glue that lets you do something like this.

In his runkit example uses a glue class called MethodHelper that uses various things (including some reflection) to manually look into the classes and find the static information.

A fun proof of concept, but not something (for efficiency reasons) you'd probably want to run on a busy production site.

Before you read the rest of the article (you may not be interested in the coding side) the end result is that I have built an AuctionAd$ display system that adjusts the keywords it uses based upon the visitor clicking adverts. This means that your visitors will automatically adjust what is displayed for them by clicking or not clicking on the adverts shown.

You still have control over the keywords you use but, instead of a supplying a single keyword, you supply a list that it initially selects from and then adapts based on your visitors interaction.

He shows his method - grabbing the keyword information from a SQL database that has a weighting system based on the number of mouseovers for the ad for that keyword. The information is stored in a SQL database and is updated dynamically via an ajax request.

The problem with finding a reliable pool of such pages is that basic search often contaisn many blog, forum, bugs.php.net and alike entries which area copy & paste outputs from users. This maybe fine in some instances, but what if you just want the real phpinfo() pages. The answer is surprisingly simple.

His solution? To search for an element always in the page, but unique to it - usually the term you're looking for (like his suggestion of "Zend Scripting Language Engine"). He links to two result sets, one from Google and the other from Yahoo.

Besides the phpinfo information, Ilia also mentions the other handy data you can find with similar searches to major search engines like Apache header information.