Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. I hesitated when recommending gzip compression when speeding up your javascript because of problems in older browsers.

But it’s the 21st century. Most of my traffic comes from modern browsers, and quite frankly, most of my users are fairly tech-savvy. I don’t want to slow everyone else down because somebody is chugging along on IE 4.0 on Windows 95. Google and Yahoo use gzip compression. A modern browser is needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web speed — so gzip encoding it is. Here’s how to set it up.

PHP compression is an excellent method of conserving bandwidth and reducing client download times. We have already discussed an excellent method for CSS compression, and in this article we share a super-easy technique for compressing all PHP content without editing a single file.

Using two PHP files and two corresponding lines of .htaccess, it is possible to compress your PHP files via gzip-encoding. Browsers and other user-agents capable of interpreting gz-encoded data will employ the compressed content, while other user-agents will utilize the content uncompressed.

PHP and SQL Server are a powerful combination, however sometimes data stored in a text type column is truncated for no apparent reason after 4096 characters. Here’s how to fix the problem.

Although the specification of the HTTP protocol does not specify any maximum length, practical limits are imposed by web browser and server software.

Microsoft Internet Explorer (Browser)

Microsoft states that the maximum length of a URL in Internet Explorer is 2,083 characters, with no more than 2,048 characters in the path portion of the URL. In my tests, attempts to use URLs longer than this produced a clear error message in Internet Explorer.

Firefox (Browser)

After 65,536 characters, the location bar no longer displays the URL in Windows Firefox 1.5.x. However, longer URLs will work. I stopped testing after 100,000 characters.

To generate random numbers with JavaScript we employ the random() method of the Math object. It returns a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.
JavaScript Math object has several methods and we shall encounter three on this page – the first one being random().

var rand_no = Math.random();
alert(rand_no);

Introduction

jQuery is awesome. I’ve been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I’m liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it’s inner workings.

I’m no jQuery expert. I don’t claim to be, so if there are mistakes in this article then feel free to correct me or make suggestions for improvements.

I’d call myself an “intermediate” jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I’ve learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I’ll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you’re interested in.