Adapting Microsoft .NET Framework Technology

It is now quite long, I have updated blog. Actually, it was hard time for me. There were whole lot of bad and some good things happened during this time. Things like not getting good grades and even more worse that again got compartment in one of the subject, really making me fell down. At one point of time, I even thought of stop doing all these computer stuff. But luckily, I can't. :) Later on, me and a friend, was discussing about doing something together and so decided to start a Technology Blog. We started off with very excitement. But later on, we don't write much on it. By the way, blog is GeekSingh.com.

When I was new in Web Technology, it seems like PHP is only giant available to develop Dynamic Web Applications. I really work hard on learning and practicing it. It was really fun. But when I try to build larger Applications. I got stucked every-time. There was so many ideas, which I was unable to implement fully, I always got stuck in between the Projects. The reason is, PHP is a scripting language, which is not targeted for developing a specific kind of Web Applications.

Reading Excel Spreadsheets with PHP

PHP is yet most powerful language when it comes to deal with different data formats like SQL Results, XML Files etc. To improve the functionality of PHP, we use extensions. There are many extensions/packages which let us to read more different types of data formats. Today, we will be using one of them, i.e. phpexcelreader.

PHPExcelReader comes with two files oleread.inc and reader.php. We will need to include reader.php in order to use the package. For the sake of "simplicity", I have made some changes in example file and data. Grab it here:

CurrentStatus Wordpress Plugin

As you may have noticed a little box on the left sidebar of my blog home page(currently not available), which displays my current status and mood. While creating this blog, I came to know that it is good to have your current status on blog, so if you not going to post any new stuff, you can tell to your reader that to you are going to have a break now. ;)

So, I searched for related plugin, but didn't quite get the exact thing I want. Then decide to make one new on my own. This is my first try on wordpress plugin, so I want to share it here, hope folks found it usefull.

Firstly, Download the CurrentStatus plugin. Unpack it and upload the directory currentstatus to your wordpress plugin directory (wp-contents/plugin/).

Track Geolocation of visitors: PHP and IP-to-Country Database

Geolocation is a geographical location of peer computer connected with some network i.e. local, or internet. That location can be anywhere in the world. When a computer gets connected to any network, a unique IP address is allocated and assigned to it, which uniquely identifies its identity on that network. IP address is a 32-bit number which is divided into 4 sections, each section is separated with a dot, and contain any number from 0-255. An IP address is very sensitive and complex to grab it all. It contains all the required information like network, location, host of the computer.

Webmasters and Bloggers are always interested to see whom visiting there site, where they came from, etc. There are some free tools on web to track your visitors. Google Analytics and Statcounter are two most popular and accurate tools for visitor tracking. They extract information like region, city, country, referral, ISP, etc from an IP address and provide us processed information in form of graphical components like chart, graphs and pie.

If you are interested to make such tool or you want to use it in your own way, here is the procedure to do it.