Rent A Coder – Resume Page Ratings to RSS

Myself is more or less active at RAC, and wanted to show off my buyers comments in a page for promoting me. And wrote this script rac2rss. Download from here.

The main script is rac2rss.php, change the line [php] $coder_id = “1242159”; [/php], in rac2rss.php to get your resume. [php] $myFileMgr = new fileMgr(‘./cache’,7 * 24 * 60 * 60); [/php] defines the cache, and the cache folder should be world / webserver writable, and it can be outside web path for security reasons, only that the absolute or relative path should be provided, as well the lifetime is in seconds, actually in the said script I have put it as a week.

As a last note, thanks to all members and maintainers of RAC, for making it a wonderful place for all of us.

Search Engine Optimizing PHP Scripts

PHP pages have a reputation of being more difficult (or at least different) to SEO than static HTML pages. Here is an overview of the major issues encountered when trying to optimize PHP script for search engines. While this focuses on PHP much of it is still relevant to SEO ing dynamic pages in general.

PHP Speed

While page size does affect load time, spiders run on servers connected to high bandwidth networks, so download time is less important than the latency of the PHP script execution time. If a search engine spider follows a link on a site and is forced to wait too long for the server to process the PHP code behind that page, it may label your page as unresponsive.

The biggest delays in a PHP script typically are the database and loop code. Avoid making SELECT * calls, instead explicitly name all the columns you want to retrieve, and if you are using MySQL, test your queries using the EXPLAIN statement. To optimize loops consider using duplicated code instead of loops that don’t repeat very many times, also use as many static values, such as count($array) values inside the loop as you can, generating their values before the loop once.

Use of Compile Cache

The execution times can be improved by implementing compile caches like Turk MMCache (https://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net) or APC as a php module. Though I do agree, that these would not be sufficient where contents are changing dynamically or across time.

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