Something I have been saying for a long time now is how the Web World is a guessing game. The same thing can be applied to many other occupations. Facebook, Twitter, and so many other "start ups" that have succeeded in becoming a house hold name in the beginning had no idea if they would be viral.

Facebook had a humble beginning that lead to a insanely addicting social network that allows you to connect with everyone you know and their trash cans. Twitter provides us with a 140 characters or less thoughts. Which is nice as Facebook friends to give us WAY to many details about their lives.

Suddenly with these two start ups they created a new fad. Status updates!

What does this all mean? Basically they chimed in on what they thought to be a "hole" in the market. This hole they filled or rather created.

Ever had issues with putting HTML inside of HTML text boxes? This can be a pain as often times you will find different browsers will read it fine, but then some will break it.

In PHP there is a wonderful function called "htmlentities."

Filtering inputs is often a huge issue when figuring out which method is best. Typicallly its a matter of what exactly are your needs. Asking these few questions can resolve the problem.

1. Is the input needing more than letters a-z and 0-9?
2. Does the input need to be able to allow some tags but not others?
3. Can you filter everything out and not worry about what it returns?
4. Can you convert html characters to their entities so it still displays properly?

Finally I have recreated my website. It is using a content system I created from the ground up. I will be writing more on this system in the future. A small list of features this system can do:

• Manage Multiple Sites in one.
• Member Registration
• Banners
• Page Control / SEO
• And so much more...