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A good tip I've found is, if you're unsure about your SQL query syntax. Check it in PHP MyAdmin first!

Navigate to PHP MyAdmin

Click the SQL tab at the top of the page

Type / paste in your query

Press go on the bottom right of the page.

I wonder if anybody could suggest a good book for learning how to template in WordPress?

I am familiar with the Joomla CMS and would like to get into templating for WordPress as well. Ideally the book should cover the basics of WordPress but be detailed in the art of templating and design. 

It appears from a book I'm reading Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business (Evan Bailyn), that SEO is not all that it seems.

The principles of getting a high ranking on Google are clouded by wide misinformation, spread by word of mouth by so called "web gurus", but also by Google themselves.

I have always been told (even through formal education!) and that modern websites are ranked on the quality of their coding and the copy within each of the site's pages. I have also underestimated the power of links to a website.

No matter how good your website, if nobody links to it then you're not going to come up near the top of the search results!

The solution it seems is to earn trust with Google. How do you do that? Well this is what the whole book is dedicated to, however it can be summarised in a few points.

Carefully consider keywords that you want to your site to be associated with.

Use those keywords to link to your site from other reputable sites - Don't pay for links. And don't always use the same keyword phrase.

Don't spam keywords into your text.

Try and make the site and any links to it seem "organic" i.e. Don't try too hard because Google can tell it looks un-natural!

Be patient! Google takes time to adjust to the new site on the block.

There is obviously more to it than just these five points, but this is a good starting point for somebody who knows nothing of SEO.

I can only apologise for my lack of a web presence in the last few weeks. I have been quite busy though!

Firstly, I have finished off a project I have been working on. This can be found at http://www.mummatters.co.uk .

I have also started to learn PHP from a book by Vikram Vaswani. (PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE (Beginner's Guides (McGraw-Hill)).

I'm only on chapter two but I already greatly appreciate how similar it is to JavaScript with syntax. Consistency between languages makes a massive difference to how easy things are to pick up.

I also highly recommend this series of books. I picked up JavaScript from another book in the series. They are easy to follow, go at a good pace and have test yourself sections after each chapter so that you can check your knowledge.

Amazon.co.uk sell most of them as far as I'm aware, the ones in the series match the cover of the first book in this list.

Finally a quick note about a piece of software I've recently discovered called "Aptana". It is an IDE (Integrated development environment) like Dreamweaver, only its open source and therefore free! I love its auto formatting, I actually think it out-performs Dreamweaver in this respect as well as auto-indenting and automatically creating closing tags. It seems to do a lot of things such as error checking and validation as well. Although I've not fully investigated all of its features. Anyway, its well worth checking out from http://aptana.com/ .

First off, let me apologise for the week or so of silence!

I have not been ignoring you all, I have simply been racking my brains trying to solve what I thought would be a nice little Javascript problem to test my skills.

I have been trying to find out how old someone is in years, months and days. You would think this would be a simple task. It turns out, not so much!

Basically, how old somebody is, is by definition the difference between the current date and the date they were born. Transcribing this problem into Javascript becomes more problematic, even before you start getting into leap years!

The easiest part to work out is how old somebody is in years. To do this you simply need to take the birth year away from the current year. This is easy enough to do in Javascript, by using a date function to get the date, assigning the year to a variable, asking for their date of birth, assigning that to a variable and taking one away from the other.

Getting into the months and days becomes quite alot trickier. Currently I am not sure how I am going to solve this. This is why a decimal calender would make life so much easier!

As promised, here is an excerpt from the layout that I came up with. With my details censored (natch).

This layout was done using HTML5 and using CSS3 properties.

I liked the idea of having a timeline that made it easy to see what happened when. I used the HTML5 canvas element to make this. This is actually the first time I've used the canvas element, and whilst I was dreading it, it wasn't actually too difficult. (Although admittedly I was only drawing straight lines and text!)

For the headers I used Mozilla's excellent gradient tool (http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/) and tried to use light colours that wouldn't hide the heading text if the CV was printed out in black and white.

I used the CSS3 rounded corners and box shadow rules. Although annoyingly the box shadow didn't show up when I printed to .pdf!

For the table striping I used the CSS3 nth-of-type(odd) and nth-of-type(even) rules with a background colour to style the rows.

Finally I used the Google fonts API for my font. I prefer Google fonts to using the @fontface rule, I just generally get better, clearer results.

In some ways this project was relatively easy because I didn't have to worry about browser compatibility (since I was converting it to .pdf) which allowed me to experiment with a few parts of HTML5 that I'd not tried, like the Canvas element.

So today I thought it was about time to update my CV, since I've recently become an Adobe associate in both Flash and Dreamweaver. (Woohoo!)

I opened up the Microsoft Word document that contained my CV, which is currently colour coordinated ("oooh fancy!" I hear you cry!) and in a grid structure of boxes.

I'll be honest, it looks okay. Nothing more, nothing less. But after struggling for what seemed like the millionth time with Word's notorious formatting when anything other than plain text is involved, It struck me. I'm a web designer. WHY am I using Microsoft Word to do a CV? Why let it restrict how good it could look? I could make it with HTML and CSS, make it look nice AND show off some of the skills that I would need to demonstrate in a new job. I could then convert it to PDF so that it could be sent by email and printed easily.

Having then thought about designs, it is also clear that CVs are "boring" text for a reason. They need to be clear and they certainly shouldn't contain so much colour and jazz that a prospective employer has to spend a fortune on ink just to have a copy printed out to glance over. It is also worth bearing in mind that a lot of print outs are done on black and white only laser printers. So colours may confuse the matter.. (oops).

I think a design that includes an interesting (but clear) font and using some sort of rounded box system with borders could be the way to go. I will definitely post up some pictures when I'm done so you can see what you think.

The Google font API has a range of simple yet easy on the eye fonts that will probably do the trick (http://www.google.com/webfonts).

As for the colour scheme, I think I'll try and stick to black and white, but we will see where experimentation takes us!

This tutorial goes through the whole process of adding an article and making it visible in a menu. (Again using Joomla.)

A tutorial I made showing how to add article content to Joomla. This was specifically to help somebody I am building a site for.

For those of you who are familiar with Joomla, this method works for menu items that are set to "category blog."

The daily blogging thing immediately ran into difficulties! 

In my defence I've been revising for two exams over the last week or two. I have been studying to become an Adobe associate in Dreamweaver and Flash..

..And now I am! I passed both my exams with 87.5% which I'm pretty pleased with! 

If I have one criticism of the computerised exams, it would be that the software simulations are very limiting. Whilst there are many ways to achieve the same thing in Dreamweaver (and Flash), the simulations will only let you do things one way. A lot of the functions of the full software are limited, so you have no choice. (You can also not tell whether the computer has recorded your actions, as there is no visual feedback.)

Today has been a great example of the trials of internet design - difficult at first, but rewarding once mastered.

I have been trying to design myself a template for this blog, but the learning curve has been somewhat steep. (What I have done so far has been applied - its a bit rough around the edges and doesn't work properly in IE)

Whilst Tumblr do provide a guide here it still took me a few hours to work out the basics through trial and error.

For example, in the the first major code excerpt that shows an example of a layout, it shows the posts nested within an ordered list. It is not clear from the tutorial whether the post block tags need to be contained within an ordered list or not (they don't). There is also no explaination as to why the block tags for posts need to beoutsideof the post div tags, whilst other tags will work finewithindiv tags.

My final moan is that when you paste in custom HTML and Tumblr gives you a realtime preview, it is not especially accurate (much like a Dreamweaver render of a page as opposed to a browser render). This can make fine tuning a bit of a pain.

Having said all of that, once you get the hang of it, its not that difficult really! (touch wood - I've still not finished fine tuning yet!)

Hopefully I'll get the design done tomorrow. Then I have an idea for a geeky little Javascript applet I'm going to write for the the header.

Firstly, thanks for taking the time to read my blog, I hope that you will find it either informative, entertaining or (hopefully) both!

I feel I should provide a brief introduction. My name is Anthony, I am 24 years old and I am currently learning how to become a web designer. This is a career choice that I made a year or so ago, although I have always had a passion for the web.

In the last year I have either taught myself or have studied formally:

HTML (Including HTML 5)

CSS

JavaScript

jQuery

Joomla

Joomla templating

Dreamweaver

Photoshop

Flash

Firebug

So, as you'll appreciate. I've been quite busy!

But why start a blog? Well, whilst spending most waking hours with my head inserted into a veritable feast of text books trying to grasp sometimes quite complicated concepts, I realised that teaching yourself is all very well, but sometimes you need help.

I have lost count of the amount of hours that I have lost trying to work out how to overwrite a deeply embedded CSS file in a Joomla template or why changing some seemingly unrelated property breaks your page layout. I normally get there in the end, but its not ideal.

My idea is that, if I blog daily (we'll soon see how optimistic this notion is!) about what I've been up to, what problems I've had and how I've solved them, then perhaps I'll be able to help people in a similar position to me. Alternatively, you may have had a similar problem and be able to help me out!

Finally, I apologise in advance for the shameless self plug but I am currently looking for work. If you are an employer who is looking for an eager to learn front end developer in a trainee / junior role then please contact me!

Equally if you would like a website designing then get in touch and we can discuss what you want!

A brief portfolio can be found at: http://atfproductions.carbonmade.com/

Thank you for taking the time to read my blogging debut.