in this new post to his site Sherif Ramadan shares a method for visualizing your website's visitor data with the help of the Google Visualization APIs and some geolocation.

The web is a place where everyone is in your backyard. This can be both a blessing and a curse. How do you know where your website traffic is coming from and how much of it there is? [...] How was traffic led to your website in the first place and why? How long do people stick around and what do they like the most about your site? These are all some of the many questions you can answer with web analytic software, but the real question is why would you want to answer these questions at all and what's the best way to look at the answer?

[...] If we look at a heat map it's easier to spot where the majority of our visitors and traffic are coming from, geographically. It also helps us understand that people visiting a virtual space can, and will, be physically located in different parts of the world.

He includes the steps to recreate a map like the one included in this page showing the current view statistics on his site. He uses a MySQL backend to store the GeoIP data and parses out the Apache "access_log" to get the IPs of the visiting users. He then runs these against the GeoIP data and passes this country data on to Google's visualization for handling. He also recommends using the tools offered by the Google Webmaster Tools to further enhance your introspection into your site's visitors.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to handle simple pagination in a popular PHP framework, CodeIgniter.

Pagination is particularly useful when you are coding an application that interfaces with a database. A large dataset might have hundreds of possible results for one query, and pagination creates a much nicer user experience. In this tutorial, I'll use CodeIgniter's pagination library to show you how you can create a paginated list of results from a MySQL database. Along the way, you'll also see how to fix a problem with the pagination links that the library might produce.

He starts on the backend, creating a model to work with Country information and includes a "fetch_countries" method to grab the limited/paged list. Next up is the controller with an "example1" method that looks to the URL to see what page it should be on. The view is simple enough - just outputting the results back without worrying about how many to show.

Ilia Alshanetsky has started to gather more and more information about PHP usage on the web as a whole (that was started here) and has been extended with some additional statistics he's done on the location of the domains he's collected.

The first step of the process has been resolving all of these domains, which is now complete. The next step is fetching the server information, which began, but will take some time to finish. However, even from the domain revolving data there is a lot of useful data to be gleamed, which is what I am now publishing. My first focus was on the world-wide distribution on these TLDs, which at least for me held a few surprises.

He includes a few graphs of the results he's found showing things like:

• The US has the most domains hosted followed with less than half by Germany
• The overwhelming majority of the PHP domains are in the .com area
• In the US, the state with the highest number of PHP-powered domains was Arizona with Clifornia coming in second

If you'd like something more interactive, he's also come up with a clickable world map of the results for you to click around on.

If you're looking for Open Source events to attend in your area (or just about anywhere around the world), check out this calendar as provided by Init Marketing with a great listing of happenings in over fifteen countries around the world.

Below calendar contains world-wide conferences and trade fairs related to Free and Open Source Software, IT and specific industries. It also shows events where you can meet with InitMarketing.

Countries included in the list are Germany, the US, Japan, Italy, Australia, China and many more. If you have an event that's not on the list and you'd like to see added, leave them a comment on that page and they'll get in contact with you.

DevShed finished off their tutorial series looking at mapping IPs to countries in a CodeIgniter application with this new article completing the application to provide a correct products list based on their location.

In this final chapter of the series, I'll be discussing how to build multi-lingual web pages by combining the functionality brought by the "iptocountry" MySQL table that you learned in previous tutorials and the power of the Code Igniter PHP framework.

Their database tables sort the prodcuts out with the three character country code they're associated with. The IP-to-country tables then help with the translation between the visitor's IP address and which products should be shown.

DevShed has posted the second part of their series looking at an IP-to-Country mapping application, this time with a focus on building some simple applications to use the data inside.

Building a web site that will be seated on a multi-lingual platform often requires developing an IP-to-country application that permits you to map users' IP addresses to their corresponding countries. [...] This database contains over 82,0000 records and allows you to map more than 3,200,000 IP addresses to their respective countries. This can be really handy for developing different IP-to-country applications with minor efforts.

The review the previous article on making the database and move ahead to create a script that selects - based off the IP range - the country that address could be from.

DevShed has launched a new four-article series today looking at resolving a user's IP to their country via the database provided here.

If you have content in several different languages, your visitors probably speak several different languages as well. Wouldn't it be nice to serve them content from your site in their native language, based on the country from which they hail? You can, even if you're a small company, with an application that tells you a visitor's country based on their IP address. This four-part article series will show you how to build the application and incorporate it into your web site.

They just get things set up in this first part of the series - grabbing the CSV file from the site, creating the MySQL table to import it into and running a script to parse the CSV and push its data into the table.

In a case study posted to his blog, Toomas Romer wonders if a PHP script is embarrassingly slower than than its Java counterpart.

The problem. The PHP implementation [of the IP2C library] is a lot slower. Embarrassingly slower. Without any caching the Java version is able to do ~6000 queries per second. The PHP counterpart can push through ~850 queries. The implementations are the same. The stats provided by the author of the library are 8000 vs 1200. So about the same as my measurements.

He details the script, showing what parts the script is taking up the most time on. A large part of the execution is tied up in IO and the fseek/fread and readShort/readInt functions take up a good chunk.

He even tries removing the functions and making things a bit more streamlined. This helps, but still lags behind its Java brother. Check out the post for more statistics comparing the two.

If you're in the area of The Netherlands and you're into PHP, consider yourself lucky - just look at all the events that Ivo Jansch mentions in one of his more recent blog entries:

PHP is still growing in The Netherlands (according to nexen.net, 46% of Dutch domains use PHP). A good indicator of PHP's growth is the number of conferences and other events that are organized this year. [...] This year alone, there are already 6 major (>50) events; 3 done, 3 to go.

Some of the events (like Dutch Joomla Days and the PHP Business Seminar) have already passed but there's still a chance to get in on a few others like Kings of Code and the Dutch PHP Conference.

In an effort to help employers/recruiters/etc find the PHP people they're looking for, the PHPClasses.org website has launched their PHP Professionals Directory:

So, I thought to myself, instead of recommending people, I could provide a place where available PHP professionals looking for work could list. Then companies can look up the list of available professionals and contact them directly.

Developers are divided first by country, then by name and have all the contact information you'd need (address, zip, location, phone) to get in contact with the developer. You can also add your own profile to the directory to make it easier for others to find you.