KB Category: Technologies

The buying and selling of goods and services over the internet.

What is an SSL Certificate?

1. Authentication:
   • Identity Verification: SSL certificates confirm that a website is legitimate and that the server you’re communicating with is indeed the one you intend to reach. This helps prevent phishing attacks and other forms of online fraud.
2. Encryption:
   • Data Protection: SSL certificates enable encrypted communication between a user’s browser and the web server. This ensures that any data transferred between the two is secure and cannot be intercepted or read by unauthorized parties. Encryption protects sensitive information such as credit card numbers, login credentials, and personal data.

ActivityPub is an open and decentralized protocol for social networking on the Internet. It is based on Pump.io’s ActivityPump protocol and allows users to create, update, and delete content through a client/server API. Additionally, it enables servers to communicate with each other through a federated API for delivering notifications and content.

ActivityPub is considered a standard for the Internet and is part of the Social Web Networking Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Originally named “ActivityPump,” the protocol was later renamed to ActivityPub to better reflect its purpose of cross-publishing. It is widely supported in the Fediverse, surpassing other standards.

ActivityPub was officially recognized as a Recommendation by the W3C in January 2018. This protocol, primarily developed by a team led by Christine Lemmer-Webber, specifically focuses on Internet publishing. It is worth noting that the team behind the protocol consists mainly of queer individuals, whose unique perspectives influenced the incorporation of features aimed at safeguarding against unwelcome interactions. Interestingly, the development of ActivityPub did not involve any participation from corporate entities.

The W3C Social Community Group hosts an annual conference called ActivityPub Conf, which focuses on discussing the future of ActivityPub. In the future, ActivityPub protocols may potentially facilitate the federation of Internet platforms.

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language,  is a basic coding language used to create web pages. HTML tells the web page where certain elements are (i.e. the footer, the header, paragraphs, etc.) and it is standard across all web browsers. 

What does HTML look like? Well, depending on the elements, the code used may be different but the format remains the same. 

For page headings, the HTML code would look like:

 <h1> Here is a Title </h1>

<h1> signifies the beginning of the heading, while </h1> signifies the end of the heading.

Alongside the elements of text are attributes. Attributes provide further information about the elements in play. For example, if you are looking to have the header in the center of the page, it would look like this: 

<h1 style=”text-align: center;”> Here is a Title </h1> 

HTML all comes together into a web page when the code, written in plain text, is saved into an .html file, shared to the internet via a web address or URL, and then translated into a web page via your browser.

This simple yet powerful coding language is what makes the internet possible. Web321’s team has been working with HTML since the very beginning, watching it grow from a new language to its current form as HTML 5.

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Its name is a combination of “My”, the name of co-founder Michael Widenius’s daughter, and “SQL”, the abbreviation for Structured Query Language.

You may be wondering that if PHP is used to build web pages, what is HTML there for? Well, HTML is the scripting language that is used in web development on the client-side, while PHP is loaded onto the browser after being executed on the server-side.

Having said that, PHP and HTML usually go hand in hand. How would that work? A script written in PHP can be loaded into HTML and helps in creating dynamic web pages. A great way to know whether the web page you are visiting was built on the server-side or the client-side is to look at the extension. The URL of PHP-built pages end with a “.php”.

PHP is a highly flexible scripting language that stands out for its ability to connect to a wide range of database software, including MySQL and Oracle. Although it does not have as much control over a web page as JavaScript (another webs page building language) does, yet it’s the dynamic nature of the language that makes it suitable for multiple applications.

Do you know what version of PHP is running on your website? Try to find out!

Being open-source, it is freely available for programmers to modify and build beautiful websites in minutes. This is one of the reasons it is a popular scripting language for building e-commerce platforms. Other applications of PHP include content management, blogs, forums, bulletin boards, and so on.

With PHP, developers also have the freedom to choose the platform on which the code will be run. This can be attributed to the language’s ability to run on all kinds of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and Solaris.

You can also choose whatever web server you are comfortable with, as PHP runs on both IIS and Apache. With PHP’s high user-friendliness, dynamic web development becomes easy and flexible.

Which Version of PHP is the Most Current?

The current and recommended version is PHP 8.2. PHP 8.2 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, including read only classes, null, false, and true as stand-alone types, deprecated dynamic properties, performance improvements and more. Many applications like WordPress plugins were written for PHP 7.4. Updating to PHP 8.1 or 8.2 could cause older applications to fail.

In order for your WordPress website to function properly, your host must, at the very minimum, support PHP version 7.4. The official WordPress website recommends you run the highest available PHP version, but still, that could mean your current site may fail or some elements may need to be deactivated.

Sources:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-php-used-for-uses-advantages.html[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

For Web programming languages, JavaScript is the most widely used language past HTML itself. And if you’re learning JavaScript, you will also need to familiarize yourself with a JavaScript Library known as jQuery.

Simply put, jQuery helps you write less and do more. The library was developed by John Resig, an expert in the JavaScript programming language, and presented in 2006’s BarCamp NYC gathering. Resig’s goal was to create a way to take repetitive task blocks in JavaScript and strip down the unnecessary markup to leave short and understandable “recipes” called methods.

The most important features of jQuery include:

• HTML manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• DOM manipulation
• DOM element selection
• HTML event methods
• Utilities
• AJAX
• Effects and Animations
• JSON Parsing

Let’s also look at a few of the advantages of using jQuery:

• Makes programming faster and more efficient.
• Easier to learn because it supports the same JavaScript style coding.
• Because it is open-source, it has a huge community, which means constant support and add-ons.
• Has extensive documentation.
• You get a ton of plug-ins that let you extend its functionality as needed.
• Works well with other JavaScript libraries.
• Simplifies sending asynchronous HTTP requests to the server without reloading the page.
• You can create dynamic effects through the application by calling on several animation methods.
• Event handling is reduced to a few lines of code.

As useful as jQuery is for simplifying individual functions, programmers can extend it even more in the form of plugins. These plugins are created by jQuery users based on code found in the library. These can be found on the official jQuery UI (User Interface) repository and are curated by jQuery’s professional community. Some of the most useful jQuery plugins include Effect, TaggingJS, Autocomplete, Scrollmagic, Fine Uploader, Blueimp Gallery, Slick, AnimateScroll, and Infinite AJAX Scroll.