My new mantra is working Online All the Time. I have stopped using all the softwares those I need to download and install. The list includes Msoffice and my favorite feed readers like "Feed Reader" and "Awasu". I have found out the web based alternative like SNARF! http://www.tatochip.com/
If you have your own website with PHP support, you can create your own RSS Feed Aggregator page by installing a simple php script on your web server. More information is available here...
http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zvonfeeds.php

Unsure whether your PHP web server has the required functions installed to run a particular script? If so, use the function_exists() function to check. For example, if I wanted to see if the fopen function existed with my PHP build, I would use the following code:

(?php echo function_exists("fopen"); // Outputs 1 if exists ?)

You don't need to learn complex password protection using JavaScript or PHP. If you want to access the confidential information and if you are accessing it from a particular location that has a static IP address, then the life can be much easy. I access the net from my home. I have an IP address 202.63.174.20 I found it out by googling "what is my IP address?" This IP doesn't change. If you are using dial up then the next time when you connect to your ISP, it will allocate you a new IP. In that case this tip won't work.
I have created a .htaccess file with following code and I will put it in the directory that I want to protect. If I put it at the root, my entire site will become private, intranet sort of!
(Limit GET)
order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 202.63.174.20
(/Limit)

The script (change the ( with <) will deny access to all except the one mentioned above to the directory and sub directories below it.If my IP address is shared by more than one computer (and that is possible since unique IP is very costly)then all those computers have access to the directory. This limitation is actually a blessing for small and medium size companies. Since everyone in the company is using the company network that has a single unique IP address, you can make information available to everyone in your company without providing access to the world. Thus you can create an ultra user friendly protected directories or site without writing a single line of code!

Well, here's a cool tip to disable the ability to select text on a page.
Just replace your opening tag with this line:
(BODY onselectstart="return false")
Then check out your page. You will see that you can't drag across the text to highlight it.
This will help you if you don't want the users to copy the text from your website.

Create a file with the following code in it.

<?php
phpinfo ();
?>

Save it on your server and access it through a browser.
On my server it says..

Configuration
PHP Core

Directive Local Value Master Value
register_globals On On

Master value is the value set in php.ini.
Local value is a setting set with something else, a .htaccess file for example. You can create an .htaccess file with one of the following line in it...

php_flag register_globals on
php_value register_globals 1

Now next time you can access variable just by printing it to the browser..

print $username;

To add a helpful function to your form, you can include a contact email form that would submit an email to Manager with a subject line that starts with "Product Questions."
This would allow Manager to create rules in Outlook to easily sort emails having to do with Gnomedex.
The form posts to itself rather than a separate ACTION page.
This allows for elegant error handling.
For example, if you enter a question but LEAVE OUT your email address and submit it. You'll see an error, but if you look at the form,
you can see that your text is still there.
It didn't vanish when the missing data produced an error.
Obviously, the form is requesting a subject line, so I needed to prepend "Gnomedex Questions" to that string.
Here's the snippet of PHP code that allowed me to do that:

(?php

// Set the from address from the form
$fromaddr = "From: ".trim($emailaddr)."\n";

// Set the to address
$toaddr = "shantanuo@hotmail.com";

// Prepend Product Questions to the submitted subject value
$msgsubject = "Product Questions: " .stripslashes(trim($mysubject));

// Append the user's IP address to the message
$msgbody = stripslashes(trim($mymessage))."\n\nIP: ".$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];

// Send the email
mail($toaddr, $msgsubject, $msgbody, $fromaddr);

?)

Internet Explorer 5.0 introduced a feature called AutoComplete. AutoComplete helps users to fill our forms by providing a pick list of previously entered values for similar form names. The Autocomplete feature can be disabled by using the "off" attribute as demonstrated below:
INPUT TYPE= "text" NAME= "uname" AUTOCOMPLETE= "off" >
To take advantage of the Autocomplete functions, make sure that you set the NAME attribute of your form text fields to similar names to those used widely on forms, such as firstname, lastname, address, etc.

PHP Print Magic
You can save the HTML tags and text in a variable like this..
$text1 = "this is text";
print $text1;

But if you want to save multiple lines, use the following code.

$text = <<

The "<<<" convention can also be used to assign blocks to print.
The word END can be replaced by any other letter.

print (three <<<)A
This uses the "here document2" syntax to output
multiple lines with $text interpolation. Note
that the here document terminator must appear on a
line with just a semicolon no extra whitespace!
A;

print (three <<<)A should have no white space before or after A otherwise you will get an error.

Q. The two tagas <?php and ?> will process the code and send the output to the browser. But what if you need to process the code within PHP?
A. output buffering will come handy for the purpose.
* ob_start("callback"); will store the instructions within the function callback.
* And the callback function will look for the word "apples" within the file testing1.htm and chage it to "oranges".
* ob_end_flush(); will push the new contents to the browser.

?php
function callback($buffer) {
return (ereg_replace("apples", "oranges", $buffer));
}
ob_start("callback");
include "testing1.htm";
ob_end_flush();
?

I think we can now move on and learn the next BIG thing in the world of Database, called SQL. Structured Query Language is the heart of database.
Unlike excel, it's "multi user" and "relational". Excel sheets and files can not be easily used by more than one person. Exchanging data is really a pain in the neck. Again, its not a relational database. You can link a cell from one sheet to another, but there are a lot of problems you may have to face in the process. You can not add "If.. then" type of logical arguments. SQL database is designed to be a "relational" database where you can easily join or link different tables with one another.
Please do not think that it's unnecessary to learn SQL at this time. If you start learning it now, six months down the line you will be glad that you did!