ISO to UTF-8 Tutorial

Searching the web for a problem I face on a greek site about encoding, I found a very useful PHP class which changes the charset of a variable.

First of you all you have to download the class from here:
http://mikolajj.republika.pl/files/ConvertCharset/ConvertCharset_v1.0.zip .

Secondly, unzip the file and upload to your /www/ folder the ConvertTables dir and the ConvertCharset.class.php .

Open your php script you want to change the encoding.
Add to the line #1 the next code:

ob_start();
include("ConvertCharset.class.php");
?>

Then, go to the last line of your script and add:

$contents = ob_get_contents(); // store buffer in $contents
ob_end_clean(); // delete output buffer and stop buffering
$FromCharset = "iso-8859-7";
$ToCharset = "utf-8";
$text = new ConvertCharset();
$contents= $text ->Convert($contents, $FromCharset, $ToCharset);
echo "$contents";
?>

Don't forget to change the meta tag charset to UTF-8 to work properly.

Here is the list charsets you can operate with. The main requirement is that a character has to be in both character sets, otherwise it will return an error.

WINDOWS
windows-1250 - Central Europe
windows-1251 - Cyrillic
windows-1252 - Latin I
windows-1253 - Greek
windows-1254 - Turkish
windows-1255 - Hebrew
windows-1256 - Arabic
windows-1257 - Baltic
windows-1258 - Viet Nam
cp874 - Thai - this file is also for DOS


DOS
cp437 - Latin US
cp737 - Greek
cp775 - BaltRim
cp850 - Latin1
cp852 - Latin2
cp855 - Cyrylic
cp857 - Turkish
cp860 - Portuguese
cp861 - Iceland
cp862 - Hebrew
cp863 - Canada
cp864 - Arabic
cp865 - Nordic
cp866 - Cyrylic Russian (this is the one, used in IE "Cyrillic (DOS)" )
cp869 - Greek2


MAC (Apple)
x-mac-cyrillic
x-mac-greek
x-mac-icelandic
x-mac-ce
x-mac-roman


ISO (Unix/Linux)
iso-8859-1
iso-8859-2
iso-8859-3
iso-8859-4
iso-8859-5
iso-8859-6
iso-8859-7
iso-8859-8
iso-8859-9
iso-8859-10
iso-8859-11
iso-8859-12
iso-8859-13
iso-8859-14
iso-8859-15
iso-8859-16


MISCELLANEOUS
gsm0338 (ETSI GSM 03.38)
cp037
cp424
cp500
cp856
cp875
cp1006
cp1026
koi8-r (Cyrillic)
koi8-u (Cyrillic Ukrainian)
nextstep
us-ascii
us-ascii-quotes

DSP implementation for NeXT
stdenc
symbol
zdingbat

Good Luck

Kanoodle Pays for Cookie Distribution

In a twist on the ad network concept, Kanoodle has launched a program that will pay publishers to distribute Kanoodle's targeting cookies, whether they show Kanoodle ads on their site or not.

The BrightAds Cookies program aims to increase the relevance of the company's behaviorally targeted ads. By increasing the data it collects on viewers of its ads that visit publishers outside its own network, Kanoodle can target more relevant ads to those users when they visit a site that serves Kanoodle's BehaviorTarget ads.

"By distributing more cookies across our network, Kanoodle is better able to fulfill the promise of behavior targeting -- offering advertisers highly-targeted leads and serving the most relevant ads to consumers," said Doug Perlson, chief operating officer of Kanoodle.

When someone visits a site in Kanoodle's network, they download a cookie that assigns them to a behavioral segment based on that site's content. Behavioral segments match up with Kanoodle's 7,500 contextual ad categories

When that same user subsequently visits a site that serves Kanoodle's BehaviorTarget ads, Kanoodle can target ads to that user based on their past Web behavior, using the anonymous user profile stored in the cookie.

Publishers in the program will be paid five percent of the revenue earned when an ad served in Kanoodle's BehaviorTarget network is triggered by the cookie from that publisher's site. If more than one BehaviorTarget cookie is present, the most recent one is given precedence.

Kanoodle expects the program to be particularly attractive to small niche publishers with a targeted audience but limited pageviews, Perlson said. Since publishers do not have to serve Kanoodle's ads to participate, he also expects the program to appeal to sites with existing ad serving relationships, or to e-commerce sites that are wary of showing ads on their site that might distract users from completing a sale.

BrightAds Cookies uses controversial third-party cookies, which face a larger risk of deletion by users and anti-spyware vendors, according to analysts. The cookies Kanoodle uses expire after 30 days and are not used to collect any personally-identifiable information.

"Cookies are crucial to the success of Internet advertising. In general, there's nothing wrong with cookies," Perlson said. "Cookies have been, and will continue to be, an important factor in the availability of free, quality content on the Internet."

The company had explored a partnership with 24/7 Real Media in May 2004 to use its Insight XE analytics platform for behavioral targeting, but never launched a product using that technology, Perlson said.

clickz

PageRank … Yes, it Does Still Matter!

It’s amazing how many people speak with such authority about how PageRank is now meangingless. PageRank - the little green bar score that Google gives to sites which, in a nutshell, is a measure of how “important” a page is based on which pages are linking to it - is still a very valuable indicator for SEO and link building. I’m not going to go into the detailed original definition of PageRank and how it works but if you don’t know the original basics, it’s an absolute must read.

Now, why are so many (seemingly SEO literate) people adamant that PageRank is now a worthless indicator of the strength of a page? Because with so many people becoming educated about the meaning of PageRank, and the general hierarchical voting system of links between pages on the internet, all the major search engines have had to counter the PageRank manipulators. And it’s no surprise that Google is leading the way.

What we have today is Google working very hard to identify and discount links that it deems less credible. Noone knows for sure exactly how it does this, but there are several good theories out there. I don’t claim to be the genious that has developed any of these theories .. they’re all out there on all the popular boards, but finding them through the dense postings of absolute crap can be a challenege.

more: Nitin Malhotra

PageRank and Pixel Envy

Buying links? Then you should check these:

1) Placement of link
2) Traffic (visitors & pages)
3) Google Pagerank
4) Number of outbound links
5) Relevancy
6) Design

Promote your blog

For the Content

1. Updated daily
2. Good content, keeping focus on the blog primary subject!
3. Medium lenght content (not short, not large. Posts that are easy to read)
4. A weekly diggest
5. Create a "sense of community" with my commenters
6. Create podcasts for the blog

Having it linked

1. Comments on forums, trying to add more value to the discussions.
2. Comments on blogs (idem forums)
3. Write papers for the users
4. Making a contest with the returning visitors, (win an Ipod every month)
5. Posting on newsgroups
6. Signature on my emails, forum posts, blog comments and newsgroups.

by Javier Cabrera
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=321370