Have you ever wondered how to create a “nice” or “clean” url such as the one for this page? Or wondered how to set a custom 404 page when users look for a page that isn’t there? Maybe you are trying to work out how to password protect directories on a web server. In this tutorial I’m going to tell you how to achieve all these things using a simple .htaccess file.

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Well its that time of year again where bloggers start gearing up to try and use our combined power to change the world. Last year Blog Action Day rallied bloggers to post about the Environment to see if we could make an impact on what people thought about that subject. I think the image below best describes the results:

This year Blog Action Day is trying to get people to take one day out and think about Poverty. They are inviting bloggers to

…examine poverty from their own blog topics and perspectives, to look at it from the macro and micro, as a global condition and a local issue, and to bring their own ideas, views and opinions on the subject.

So if you have a blog, podcast or even if you just want to donate some money then get over to the Blog Action Day website and get registered!

I suppose one of the strangest thing about standards is there are so many of them. For most programmers this is probably a familiar issue. Style and standards are pretty much dependent on the programmer or the company rather than the language, which defeats the purpose a wee bit. The only solid fundamental is that style and standards are used to make code more legible. How easy is your code to read?

Most of the debate revolves around indent style but other arguments arise about commenting, identifier naming, spacing etc. So lets have a look and see what we can find.

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