This article was originally written in 2010. This is an updated version on how to do simple Ajax requests using jQuery

Ajax is a very nice tool for web developers. It helps you interact with the visitor without reloading the page. Searching the internet you will find various Ajax code samples that are simply too complicated and some are too specific. I added some comments that will better explain what the code does and how it can be tweaked.

HTML has come a long way from its inception back in Tim Berners-Lee mind in the late 1970's but its core standard of using tags within angled brackets hasn't changed much from its first, faltering steps. Indeed, with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) getting towards the final stages of standardizing HTML5 not far away, there are now many new elements that you can use to enhance your web constructions, and that includes many you probably didn't realize exist.

In today's tutorial I will show you how to search through your bash history in order to avoid re-typing long commands every time. You will also learn about a few use cases for the grep CLI utility.

The xdiff extension is a great way to monitor and patch files or strings containing differences between different revisions. This has proven to be very useful for me on a project where I needed to implement a monitoring system for an editor. The man wanted to be able to track the historic contribution that each of his authors and proofreaders had on an article. Basically it was a git tool for journalists.

While xdiff can also do binary pacthing, I won't be focusing on that in this tutorial. Instead I will show you how to install and use the extension to compare strings.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use two of the lesser known PHP functions (metaphone($str) and levenshtein($str1, $str2)) to implement a "sounds like" search using PHP. By putting these two functions to good use, you will get exceptional results when matching phrases that contain spelling mistakes or simply 'sound similar'.