Hercco

I'm not a huge fan of cookies... if rightly used they're ok. But for advertising and profiling purposes I kinda feel my privacy intervened. If you guys ever use cookies on your site, at least inform the users of it. And preferably give them the opinion to not to use cookies, othe than banning them from the browser settings. Worst of all are sites that refuse to work without cookies.

PHP is easy to learn if you have programmed something with a procedural language before. If you haven't got any programming experience I'd suggest picking up a book or better yet taking a course on basics of programming. Far too often people think that you can become a good programmer learning by yourself. A good teacher (be it a person or a book) will explain you the use of different control strucktures, basic problem solving and algorithm designing methods, proper planning and testing, etc. Programming, in my opinion, is easy to use if you have a good teacher, but extremely hard to learn by yourself.

Nowhere. It needs to be compiled with a C++ compiler. BTW, I tested it and it works very well. Good job.

Anxious to get those new bugs huh..

Yes WLAN is really handy technology if you don't bother or simply can't do the wiring.But security is something that epecially needs to be taken account when using wireless communication. The traffic encryption that comes with 802.11b is not reliable enough. So if you you your email from your garden, make sure you use secure connection.Don't rely on link level encryption, do it on software level.

You probably know how to physically attach the devices so I won't go there. And I assume you are using Windows machines. It is actually quite simple to set up a LAN. Just make sure you have the right protocols and services (ie. TCP/IP and for example Microsoft Networks) installed. Current Windows versions have quite good automatic configuration tools for networks. Setting up LAN is not nearly as difficult as it may sound like.

One thing that people far too often don't realize is that FTP is NOT a secure way of transferring data. It is surprising to see how much FTP is used with it being as big security problem as it is.First of all, FTP traffic is in NO WAY crypted. So when you log into your webhosts ftp server your username password travels through the net in plain text. You could train a monkey to sniff the password from the traffic. And second of all the architecture of FTP, being a two channeled system (one constantly open channel open for control messages and one channel opened and closed for each file transfer) it is a real pain in the *bottom* for firewalls. Especially active FTP, which is usually simply not allowed, as you may have noticed if you have tried contacting from behind your corporation's or university's firewall.There are ways created to make FTP more secure. Basically this means the use of either SSL or SSH. Although they're slighly slower to use, I'd advice everyone to use them, if available. One option is to forget whole FTP concept and use SCP, which requires a SSH access to the server. Gladly Xisto offers SSH access in all packeges which is a great thing. *thumbs up*

Yes. With C you can do practically anything, while PHP is suitable for only certain tasks. Also the performance levels of these two languages or , to be accurate, programs created with these languages are far from each other. C programs naturally being faster being relatively low level and compiled.

I gotta go with the attachment mod. So handy.Let's not forget EasyMod installer. Although not perfect, it has made installing mods so much faster and easier.

Postgre is an open source relation database just like MySQL. The differences between relation databases aren't anything huge. So if you learn to use one, you will learn to use the others with ease.

If you don't free your result it will simply stay in the memory until the script execution is over. Basically only thing (other than memory usage) where it matters is that if you happen to have several queries, you can be sure that there are no "ghost" results around. So you will be always processing data from right results. It is good programming style to free your results when you donät need them anymore.I do not know when unclosed database connections get closed automatically (probably depends on PHP configuration), but if it doesn't do it when the script execution ends it might be a security risk. Ie. the connection could be hijacked. Again it is good programmign style to close your database connections when you don't need them. Also if you are doing queries from different databases, closing the connections ensures that you are not doing them from wrong database (ie. using wrong open handle)

MySQL is a relation database. In a relation databse all data is stored in tables. "Relation" come from the fact that attributes in table are related in someway. You might have used Microsoft Access sometime. It's databases are relation database like MySQL and in practise work the same way. A table could consist for example this kind of attributes: "name", "homepage", "email" And a row (or entry) could be "jcguy", "http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/;, "webmaster@jcguy.com" See, all the attributes are "related", they all are information about jcguy. What kilz explained in previous message was SQL which stands for Structured Query Language. It is a language for doing queries from relation databases. To get to know more about using databases I'd recommend checking MySQL developer zone at http://dev.mysql.com/ . It has really good documetation. MySQL isn't the only relation database around, there lot of others, which are probably equally good. MySQL is just so popular as it is open source under GPL and thus free.

No... Edit Plus (which I use too, it's great!) and others "understand" PHP (and other programming languages). What is simply does it highlights the reserved words and tabulates automatically.

I prefer to use a text editor which supports code highlighting. But no dreamweavers or frontpages for me.

I am self learned. I remember I read some article at a computer magazine few months after I got internet connection to my home (sometime in the mid-90's) and noticed that creating webpages isn't as hard as I assumed. I didn't really read lot of guides; when I saw a cool thing at some site (like frames, they used to be cool thing ) I checked the page source and Ctrl-C'd .

That whole GIF patent thing is so retarded. GIF had become probably the most used graphic fromat in WWW and then these guys decided to pull that patent stunt! I'm under the impression that is still illegal to use GIF images. To play it safe use PNG.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface. PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor PHP originally meant Personal Home Page but as the language grew they decided to change the name. It is a recursive acronym (P meaning PHP in which P means PHP in which P means... )

Well webpages are made using a markup languages, which aren't programming languages. Basically for webpages the markup language is either HTML or XML. What server side scripting languages like PHP or ASP do is just output markup languge. For example the PHP script creating these forum pages fetch the data of our posts from a database, processes it and prints out HTML. C or C++ can be just aswell used for the same task as server side scipting languages. There just needs to be compiled programs on the server and server set to allow execution of these programs when a webpage is requested. Similarly th programs outputs HTML (or wahtever) which is sent to user and viewed in his browser.

For all coding I use the best text editor around Edit Plus. For graphics I usually go with Photo Shop, but I have also used PSP. Depending on site, I upload my stuff either with a ftp-client with gui (like FileZilla) or with scp I test my sites with all the major browsers.