Programming Tips to Avoid Breaking Your Site

[cheater]

* If anything can go wrong, it will

* Using defensive programming to avoid things that may go wrong

- 1. Handle unexpected conditions

- 2. Process external systems data properly

- 3. Test your code

- 4. Monitor your site errors and act upon them

- 5. Do not disclose errors to the users

- 6. Damage control

- 7. Backup

- 8. Do what you can as you can never get defensive enough


(PHP Classes - PHP Classes blog: 8 defensive programming best practices to prevent breaking your sites)

[Robert]

Big tip for HTML,

Always close your div tags.

It's amazing how much damage an unclosed div tag can do.

[cheater]

I'll expand on that Robert.
In HTML, close ALL your tags the minute you make them. Then, put the content in between the two tags.
For other languages, remember your closing quotation mark. I can't tell you how many hours of debugging I've had to do because of 1 simple quotation mark. Also, remember the ; at the end of a statement (if it requires one).

[Aravapalli]

along with closing all the tags keep the parent and child relation of the tags...

[cheater]

So true. That is why keeping neat, organized, indented, and commented code is so important. Without that, nested tags get extremely confusing.

[armatik]

Or alternatively, you could visit The W3C Markup Validation Service to validate your code, since it'll tell you and you're supposed to so it displays correctly in all browsers any way.

Also, for server-side programmers, make sure you've read a LOT about security, because there are just too many ways to exploit unprotected web applications.

[cheater]

That's a good point armatik. I recently have done a lot of reading on the topic of security. After doing the reading, I realized that nearly all my scripts were prone to exploits of one type or another. I was lucky that I only had a small scale site. If my site were larger, someone could have easily exploited my scripts. This would have given them access to nearly all the files on my computer.