vanderwal.net

There is nothing like starting the New Year coding a time rollover code to pull the current information out of your weblog. This means I now have fully functioning code for month and year change overs in my personally built weblog tool. This also means I still love PHP more than any other scritping/Web coding language.

It is getting to be time to pull the code out of the PHP templates and make it more modular/object based. The site is built on a handful of templates that reuse about 75% of the same code to build the pages. From this stage it is time to pull out classes and functions and have each page point to the proper elements. This enables me (or who everelse is getting this code) to be able to make modifications in one place rather than many.

Why modular/object-based? This is how the world works. This is how things are done efficiently. This is the non-foolish way of building applications. (Looks like I am starting this year on a testy note).

one.point.zero has integrated some very nice design elements into the site. It is nice to read that it is build using PHP scripts, but that is not important, the ease of reading and using the elements around the site make it worthy of examination. The site cleanly integrates some ideas that I have had on my to do list, like the calendar. This sets a nice high benchmark for personal sites. Bravo. [hat tip Jeffery]

Those looking for a good overview of PHP should head to Webmonkey's PHP from the Ground Up article. This will give you enough information to make you dangerous or at least give you an idea of how to make the Web a better place. [hat tip Charles Johnson at LGF]

Okay, for you PHP users out there PHP and XML: Parsing RSS 1.0, from Webmasterbase.

Part 2 of the PHP security issues, which explains how to shore up your PHP application builds.

On Earthweb, Jordan Dimov, provides PHP securtiy guidence. Some of this is a restating of known holes, which have been closed, or can be closed. It is good to read through this just to be safe.

ASP2PHP does a solid job handling converting ASP (active server pages) to PHP. The report that Sun sponsored to hopefully show JSP (java server pages) taking over the site scripting market, not only showed JSP had shrunk in market share, but ASP had dropped drastically. The big winner in this survey was Perl with about 40 percent of the market and PHP was ahead of ASP.

Microsoft has given itself problems with ASP this past year or so as the next generation of ASP requires complete rewrites of your ASP code to work on the next version of server. The code is different enough that it will not port, it must be rewritten. This stopped ASP development to a large degree. Some folks have tried running ASP on UNIX with ChiliSoft, but that is only advisable as a patch until you can recode the application, as it is quite resource intensive and you adding another layer of interpretation, which never helps.

The Dev Shed offers a scenario many of us gone through in their Time is Money article. It walks through a tough scenario of delivering an intricate project with few requirements. In all it is a nice over view of developing a web based application using PHP and MySQL.

Finding the source of phpMyAdmin was a chore. It is a great tool for those with MySQL databases and have PHP on the box. It is a GUI interface to ease management of the tables and properties. I have used it for quite some time on another site and now it is time to take it to work. It is free so the price is right. It does not do ERD, but it is better than command line interfaces.