Lateral Code

No one likes it when their website suddenly goes down. Whether it’s their own site or a site they run for another person, downtime causes many problems.

First of all, websites are a very important way of communication nowadays. A downed website means that a business can no longer communicate with those whom it needs to. Second of all, it provides no end of stress for both those who visit the website and those who maintain it.

But downtime is an unavoidable part of a website’s life, so we need some ways of dealing with it.

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Spreadsheets are simple files that help you manage and organize data. They are used everywhere and have become quite popular. You can find them by using Microsoft Excel, Open Office, or even an online alternative such as Google Docs.

Generating Spreadsheets

Since computers and automation have become second nature, spreadsheet generation isn’t out of the ordinary. With MySQL databases, it becomes even more imperative, as spreadsheets are perfect to represent the data located in these structures.

Upon searching for how to create excel spreadsheets using PHP, most of the results came back with libraries that do the job. This seemed to be too much of a hassle. That’s why I’ve created 3 easy steps to create excel spreadsheets without any libraries.

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When we browse the web, we click on links. That’s what makes the web a web – the links between pages. Sometimes, those links lead us not to pages, but to files. Many types of files pop up dialog boxes prompting downloads – executables, videos, etc.

However, certain filetypes, thanks to modern web browsers, are rendered as an in-browser page, such as images, PDFs, and MP3s. While this may be a convenience, at times we may wish to force the user to download the files, not just view them in their browser.

In this article I will show two easy ways to do this. The first is using .htaccess, and the second is using PHP.

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In the modern age of the web, speed is key. Gone are the days when you opened a web page, and went outside for twenty minutes before coming back to find that the web page is almost finished loading. Even if there are still people on dial-up connections, the modern world demands speed.

In the past, one of the best ways to improve speed was to reduce the size and amount of the components of the webpage. More specifics of this are outlined in an older LC article about decreasing page load time.

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A few months back, I presented a stunningly simple CSS minifier that enables you to pack your CSS while still maintaining format and readability. Soon after that, I presented a system called Lateral Cache that you could use to store the minified CSS and deliver it quickly.

Although the Lateral Cache system works well and is great for general purposes, the CSS minifier can be aided by a more intelligent caching system. Well, what do I mean by that? That’s what you are going to find out.

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Please note that the demo link above directs you to Lateral Code’s own CSS file, where intelligent caching is used.

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