This is if  you have an FLV file and you don't want any fancy management system, you just want your FLV to play on your webpage.

The following example is a demonstration of how to do this without installing anything on your webserver.

 I like to use flowplayer for this example but my own systems can't use a solution as crude as this.

1. Copy the below code (beginning and ending with object tags)
2. Paste it into your HTML page
3. Replace both instances of the text "http://my.video.com/myVideo.flv" with the full url of your own FLV.
4. Save the HTML page and publish

The Code:

I could apply the PRINCE2 (Projects in a controlled environment) methodology to website projects  but most people find this overwhelming.  It's in business techno babble and I get asked what does this mean in stage 1?  And this in stage 2?  (There are over 100 stages)...  

Below is my template project initiation plan (project mandate?) for my freelance website development process.  It may look clean, clear, obvious... it's just an outline of what I picture as a perfect project; unfortunately the first 2 pages tend to be completed in just over a day and the rest of the time is spent faffing around with design and functionality. We use the ProjectFork extension to manage projects, it helps during times when we can't see face-to-face with colleagues or clients.

I've decided to put something in here as it took me an age to find out how I could do it.

This is when using a MySQL query within a PHP script.  The process is used often to do a statistics table or top ten chart of your data (eg. movies, music, etc).

My aim is to do the following:

1. retrieve data from a table,
2. count the number of times each data exists,
3. sort it in reverse order so that the most frequent is at the top of the list
4. print out each row with the number of times that particular data appeared in a row

My old method was to:

 I'm beginning a list as I've just spent an age trying to get PHP output to create a text file.  Then my client showed me how she then opens the text file in Excel, so I said we could get the script to do that instead.

PHP to TXT

header('Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.txt');
echo 'contents of file';

PHP to XLS

$export_file = "my_name.xls"; 
ob_end_clean(); 
ini_set('zlib.output_compression','Off'); 
header('Pragma: public'); 
header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); 
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0');
header ("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: none'); 
header('Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel;'); 
header("Content-type: application/x-msexcel");  
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($export_file).'"');

The Error: This file contains HTML or script code that may be erroneously interpreted by a web browser

This is a common error when uploading files that the MediaWiki system does not allow.  By making some minor changes to the MediaWiki LocalSettings.php file, we can fix this.

For demo purposes, I'm going to make our system recognize SWF files (by default these are disallowed):

If you've ever made PHP scripts to process data within a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) then this happens a lot.  In the following example, our HTML form will allow the user to specify a date (so excludes hours, minutes and seconds).  For demonstration purposes, I'm going to be using the European date format so DD/MM/YYYY.

Basically you have a HTML form with an input field type of 'FILE' (ie. <input type="file" name="file_to_upload" />) and want a PHP file to process this.  This example applies to a Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) environment.

The Issue

You have a PHP page which generates a HTML form.  When the user submits the form, you want the same PHP page to process the data.

Solution

I've seen a lot of people write CGI requests but if you left the action attribute blank, this would do the same thing:

<form method="post" action="">
...

I added this article because when I was only trying to look up how to do this, this nut "the Storyteller" went and carried out a benchmark test on the most popular ways of counting the occurrence of a specific word within a string of text.