"Today in the news, MySQL previews..."

As a "preview" of text, this MySQL select will return the first few words out of a text field in a database. It returns entire words (doesn't cut them off in the middle) and follows the last word with an elipse "..."

In the PHP, assign $CharactersToDisplay to a number - the approximate number of characters desired (or you can hard-code it if you want).

For the example, I also use $TheID as the row identity for the record to display.

MySQL 5.x Stored Routines, PHP Session Values, a little CSS oh my! Complex to set up but easy to impliment. Geared toward security, simplicity (of use) and convenience.

I use this in my AJAX as a quick way to get the Value of the selected item in a Select HTML object. If nothing is selected, it returns zero.
(May be basic to y'all, but maybe really usefull to someone else).

If it's a .php page, you can simply include this file where you want a hit counter to appear.

One file - text output. Very simple, very easy. Based off the filename of the page (creates a pagename.counter file to hold the count).
(No use for it myself - made it for a friend).

When you need to perform an action on a single row of data, many people turn to cursors. Cursors come with a lot of overhead in the database engine and can be confusing. Here's a way to get the same results without the overhead in a much simplier way.