Developing a User Personalization System with PHP and Cookies - Conclusion (
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This is just a brief example which could be made much more
robust by adding more news sources, or adding other features, such as the
ability to change your choices (actually that should be a required feature,
edited out here for brevity). Using these techniques, it would be fairly
straightforward to pull all manner of data from a common database based on the
visiting user, and print it out to their browser. It is precisely this sort of
process which enables Yahoo or Excite to show your favorite stocks on their
homepage, Amazon to make a pretty good guess on books you might like to read,
and any number of news sites which will show current weather for your area.
Think about what people would enjoy seeing at your web site or how other web
sites could improve. I personally think it would be great if everytime I went to
Pricewatch, it would show me up front the best prices for whatever hardware I'm
interested in that week (after I specify the hardware, that is). I'd also get a
kick out of having links to updates for my favorite Football teams right on
ESPN's front page, so I don't have to click through 5 pages to get there.
Making the internet experience friendlier and more intuitive is the best way
to keep visitors coming back to your site. If nothing else, I'd recommend you
mess around with these features yourself, because these techniques can work
magic, and will definitely be in more demand in the future. Many ideas are out
there which haven't been exploited yet, and many niche subjects yearn for this
kind of feature.
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