Allow me to blatantly link out, but I really just couldn’t agree more with my friend and associate over at blog.pixelmagic.co.za

But Facebook’s just for kids!

A page or a group?

Well said M

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a physical object in the real world, like your car door, a street pole, your office front door, your product or your business card clickable so that it opens a link on the web when you click it?

Well – now you can – with mobile phone technology and these:

See below / full article for more.

What …
… you are looking at is a QR barcode … more on the technology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

These barcodes can be printed, projected on screens and televisions or attached to anything in real life you would want to make clickable to a mobile phone. A mobile phone user needs simply to walk past, hover his phone camera over it and his phone browser will open the link contained in it. It’s true, I kid you not! No really! It will even make it clickable from a distance, if you print the barcode big enough

But why?
Why not just print a http://www.somesite.com link on your delivery truck? Well that one is easy – what if you want to link to a specific discussion or content on a website that has a long URL? Something like http://www.somesite.com/articles/may2010/qrcodes/? Who would remember that or want to type that into his cellphone?

Besides – you want to interact with your customer now – not when they get home and they are at a computer, if they then actually remember your link or remember to visit your site. People don’t want to type addresses in browsers. They want to click.

So how does sticking this barcode on your business card or product packaging make it clickable.
Enter the modern cellular phone. Modern cellular phones have cameras. Modern phones are now coming out with 2D barcode scanners as standard.  Here comes the magic: You hover the phone camera over the barcode, it scans the barcode and then opens the link in your phone’s browser. Fact. Done!

QR stands for “Quick Response” so it is almost effortless to “click” that lamppost

Including QR code scanner software in new phones by default (as is the case) is also going to quickly push the adoption of 2D barcodes becoming part of mainstream society. Should your existing phone not have a 2D scanner, no problem, many free 2D scanners, that integrate with your phone’s camera, are available for free. I personally like http://www.i-nigma.com‘s solution.  Simply point your mobile phone browser to http://www.i-nigma.mobi to detect your phone and install i-nigma. I like i-nigma because it scans all formats of 2D barcodes, not just QR codes, asks permission to connect, is easy to use and keeps a history of scanned items. Ask the great google if i-nigma doesn’t suit you. Come on, try it! Install that barcode scanner on your phone and scan the 2D barcode above (effectively clicking it with your phone) right of your screen now!

Creating QR must be a pain?
No!  Just ask google again for QR code generators Easy.

There’s more!
QR barcodes can also do more when scanned with a phone  than just open a website in the browser. Exchange of information is just not limited to text being displayed on the phone, but it could open a URL, download standard contact information to the phone and generate a pre-filled SMS message to you (the business / the owner of the QR code) on the user’s phone and they just have to hit send.

Can you see it?
2D barcodes have been all the rage for quite a while in Japan. With Western adoption taking place it is just a matter of time until they become as common as the barcode on the baked beans being scanned at the local supermarket.

QR barcode on a business entrance that can be scanned from the street. You are effectively clicking their building with your phone and then browsing their website.

Imagine scanning that loaf of bread to get to a product detail website with nutritional information. Imagine scanning a barcode at the entrance to a mall to get walking directions in text (so you won’t need an internet connection) to the store. Imagine scanning that code on the for sale sign on a house to get the text info onto your phone to peruse later … imagine!
Can you imagine?

Scan me to send an sms to michaelbain requesting information on the services michaelbain provides

If you need to embed dynamic text into static text, you’ll find PHP extremely useful. It was designed for this, and it excels at it. PHP is also very useful for integrating web pages with databases.

The PHP scripting language resembles JavaScript, Java, and Perl, These languages all share a common ancestor, the C programming language.

PHP is most different from JavaScript and Java. PHP is a server-side scripting language. All of the “work” is done on the server. JavaScript (and Java) generally run on the client. They have little access to the information that the server has, and mediated access to information on the client. They can do lots of things on the client that PHP cannot. PHP has full access to the information that the server has, and very little access to information that the client has. In fact, it only has information that the client tells the server and that the server passes on to PHP. Because it is on the server, however, PHP cannot be modified by the client. While you cannot necessarily trust the information that the client gives to PHP, you can trust that your PHP is doing what you told it to do. Because PHP is on the server end, your PHP scripts can affect your server–such as by keeping an activity log or updating a database.

PHP allows you to interact with your visitors in ways HTML alone can’t. This can mean simple things like e-mail forms, or more elaborate things like shopping carts that save your past orders and recommend similar products. It can also mean social things like interactive forums and private messaging systems.

PHP (coupled with MySQL databases) is also arguably the most widely used wed development environment in the real world. It is supported by most hosters and there is a wealth of programming experience out there. A project developed in PHP is assured continued support by many professionals as it is not a niche market or a corporation owned technology.

Using PHP scripting and MySQL database enables programmers to create applications that’ll run on just about any computer, regardless of operating system. PHP has thousands of programming functions to facilitate almost any task.

If a computer can run web server software, a PHP / MySQL application is portable across operating systems and environments … PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, Windows, Lindows, Internet, Intranet, etc. This means you can develop a project on my Windows PC, and send it to my friend in Slovakia who can run it on his Linux box. It also means you are not locked in with a hosting provider.

Because there are so many existing opensource PHP and MySQL projects out there, development time (and thus cost) can also be vastly reduced if existing solutions are utilised and only customised – and not developed from the ground up.

Take the leap!