1. I'd imagine it would be quicker for simple things such as guestbooks to have PHP edit the html file directly upon receiving an entry (assuming that's even possible) rather than generating the page from the database every time someone accesses it. Is this correct?
2. I have a whole table in my database set up just for counters. My guestbook app posts the user's information to one table with the counter's value as the key value, and then decrements the counter value on the counter table by one. This way, to display the entries, PHP reads the counter and executes a for loop that iterates through all of the posts and echos them to the page beginning with the newest and ending with the oldest. I'm almost positive there's a better way to do this.
3. I have the date fetched with date('m/d/y') and then saved to a date column. I've tried different types of columns but have gotten various problems. I want the date saved as mm/dd/yy but instead it's saving as 20mm-dd-yy. So today would be 2001-07-09. I can fix this by only outputting substr($date,2,8) but I'd rather it were more efficient of course.
Thanks for reading.