Everyone has done it at one point in their life, even signed up for it and spent hours just staring at it...... but enough about Internet Porn Sites, I'm talking about User Personalization.
User Personalization is a must-know and must-have for any site thats wants to make it somewhere. It customizes the user's experience, causing them to just plain 'like' your site better. The use of user personalization ranges from site to site, at Linux.com you can choose the links that appear at the left side of the page, and if you want banner ads on or off. Yahoo.com ties all of their services together. From your personalized page, you can check your mail, check the weather, check the latest headlines and your horoscope as well. It's these little things that just make a user feel that more comfortable at your site.
This tutorial will be a step-by-step method of creating a user personalized site.
First off, the technology. What do we need? The personalization system we will create will use PHP (http://www.php.net), MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) and Cookies. Depending on how advanced you are making this system, you can even mix in other technologies, but that is not needed in this tutorial as it is just starting you off. If you do not have PHP or MySQL installed on your server, yell at your hosting company! Both of these technologies are free, and your host has no excuse for not installing them.
For an introduction to MySQL syntax, see http://www.thescripts.com/mysql/tutorials/intro/. An introduction to PHP can be found at http://www.thescripts.com/php/tutorials/intro/, or just browse the manual at http://php.thescripts.com/manual/. I recommend you visit all of these articles, as you need a basic knowledge of the languages before we start.
Now we need to know what we are doing.... This tutorial will be based on a system using various news sources from different sites, and the weather, courtesy of http://oap.weather.com/oap/index.html. You will have to sign up for their affiliate program.....