May be EA made us expect very great games after seeing that Underground was so great I don’t know. But I was expecting something real good this time… After my dissappointment in Pro Street I think I really needed this! Please make something good next time EA, pleaseee!

Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique IP address which will give the ability to create an interconnected network. Meaning that the IP addresses are like your home addresses if you think the Internet as the mailing network  around the world. You send mails by writing the street address you want to send the mail to on the envelope and this is just like writing a web site name to the browser. Now we will go in a little detail about the workflow of a browser.

When you type the domain name like http://www.google.com to a browser, the browser first finds the IP address of this domain via a DNS server. You can check out the IP address of a web site by following these steps (for windows);

1. Open the command prompt (click run in the start menu and then type ‘cmd’, or for vista just write ‘cmd’ in the search box in the start menu)
2. Write ‘ping sitename’ where sitename stands for the domain name that you want to learn the IP of. For ex. ping www.google.com
3. The first line has the IP address. Which was 74.200.243.253 for www.google.com  in my case. (IP addresses for big web sites like google can differ according to your region)

The browser actually does the same thing you did above by connecting to a DNS server. It looks up the IP of the domain you wrote and starts up a connection to that IP. If you actually type the IP you got from your ping operation to the browser, you will see that you can also connect to a web site by only providing the IP address. After the connection is established with your computer and the domain’s server, the remaining operation is the web page’s files being downloaded to your computer via your browser.

If you also want to find out your own IP address. You can type ‘ipconfig’ to the command prompt and learn it from there.

Here are the steps.

Seriously before purchasing a laptop definately consider whether the lcd and the material used is tough enough for your usage conditions or not. Don’t just get amazed with the specifications inside or else you will be afraid even to touch your laptop just like me!

1. Make your web site search engine friendly: Try to include key terms in your ordinary paragraphs. For example if you are writing an article about a product review write the name of the product you are talking about many times. But keep in mind that if you only write keywords but not provide any content for it search engines are more clever than us and will exclude your web site from their engine!
2. Make the most creative design you can: You are not have to be an artist for this. Just don’t copy other web site designs and be different. Use good color combination. Be simple, make your web site to use easily. Don’t use staff that will make you look like a beginner (like visit counts, or “best viewed in Firefox” kind of messages).
3. If this is a blog try to write an entry every day or if this is a web site try to provide new content in every week or so. Your viewers will be bored of your existing content if you don’t provide new ones. Try to keep updated!
4. Don’t use Flash or Silverlight for your entire web site. At least make the flash text selectable! The Flash or Silverlight designs are really very poor in the means of getting search engine results. The text in these designs are most of the times not selectable meaning that if you can not select a text from a web page neither the search engine spiders can. So you can not see your web page in a Google search thats all!! Just use small flash or Silverlight components to make your web site look more attractive and modern.

I will add to this list as new staff comes to my mind.

You have to be sure first that you set up your testing server. You do this when you are creating your web site at the beginning or you can change it from the menu Site>Manage Site and pressing edit.

Connecting to Your Database

After you are sure that your testing server is ok we will continue with accessing your databases. Here I will not talk about creating a database in your domain name. I assume that you already have a database and a database user/password created. We will now define a connection to our database that we created under our domain. The screenshot above shows us the panels in DW. When you click the Application panel you will face with these options. Here first we have to deal with our databases before starting our bindings and server behaviours. When we click the “+” button in the databases option we will face with the “MySQL Connection”. After clicking this a window will pop up wanting some information about our database. We are starting to fill the wanted fields for the MySQL Connection seem just like the picture below. Connection name is something you wish (you can type in anything you want). For MySQL field you should type “localhost”. For user name you should type in the database user name you created and for the password you should type in the password you assigned for that user. And if these informations are correct when you click the select button at the bottom you should be able to select the database you want from a list that pops out. If it gives you a warning massage after you click the select button, this means that there is an error in some of the fields you provided. If everything went smooth you are now connected to your database and ready to retrieve some information from it. Now you can read the following step.

Getting Information from Your Database

Getting information from a database is very easy. This is normally done by querying your database meaning that you should be able to write SQL and also use PHP. But don’t worry DW has it all for you. From the same Application panel that you clicked earlier for database connection now you will select a different subsection “Bindings”. Here in the picture you may see the Recordsets I created for getting information from my database tables. After you see the Bindings subsection you will click the “+” button. Here you will select the top choice which is “Recordset (Query)”. A window will pop up after you click which looks like the one shown below. Now we will start filling our Recordset. First you will give a name to your recordset. Try to be specific and most of the time giving the recordset the name of the table you are retrieving information from will save you time. After that you select the connection you want which is the one that we just set. Then you select the table you want to retrieve information from. The radioboxes for columns “all” and “selected” gives you the ability to retrieve all fields or selected fields from a table. After that you may oy may not provide the information for filtering your query. The filtering enables you select a specific entry from a table (for ex. getting a member information with a member id 132454). And after this we have the sorting field which is again optional. We provided all the information and now ready. We click the OK button and here is our recordset! We can click the little + on the left our recordset and can see the retrieved information there with a little lightning icon next to it. We may even use this information by drag-drop. You can use the recordset you get in populating drop down menus, lists, text boxes, and in so many ways that you can decide of. Enjoy!

If you have any problems following these steps you can write a comment here and I will provide the information you want. Feel free to remind me if I forgot anything during these steps.