Dealing with characters outside the ASCII range on the web is tough. It's tough in other environments too, but particularly for web applications since text needs to move through so many places without being mangled — from user input, through JavaScript, into and out of PHP and string manipulation functions, into and out of databases. If you're not careful, the text you start with isn't what you'll end up with after you're done handling it. That was the case with W3Counter for a long time, but not any longer. I'll tell you how. Continued »

Sometimes dynamic elements of a page can slow down page loading or use too many resources for re-running the code every page load to be practical. The sidebar of this site touches four databases to pull up the stats it shows, and the counter I just added to the header gets its count from a remote XML API. Caching data or blocks of HTML with files is an easy solution. Continued »