Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

When learning web scripting languages, it is difficult to know which route to take. There are lots of different choices each having their own advantages and disadvantages. Each of these needs to be weighed carefully before making a choice. To make matters more difficult, there are both client-side scripting languages and server-side scripting languages. In this case, we will only be discussing server-side scripting languages.

One of the first questions you must ask yourself is: “Do you wish to make money or a career out of scripting?” If your answer is yes, then you should definitely look at Microsoft ASP.Net or Java Server Pages. Many employers today are looking for people who are well-versed in ASP.Net. The problem is, ASP.Net is really an object-oriented programming language masquerading as a scripting lanaguage and involves a good proficiency at programming.

If you are more interested in just making it a hobby, then a good route to go would be PHP or Cold Fusion. PHP is available for both Unix and Windows platforms and can be run under Internet Information Services (the Windows web server) or Apache (on both platforms.) PHP is incredibly powerful and borrows a lot of syntax from Perl (another scripting language). It is relatively easy to learn but not as easy as Active Server Pages.

If you want to build a web site of your own and have it hosted, you should use a Unix scripting language because Unix is far cheaper and more reliable especially in a shared environment. I have recently begun a transition of my older ASP (windows) scripting into PHP for just this reason. PHP is well-supported and well-documented and code samples abould all over the Internet. Whatever your choice, be sure to weight the options!

Today I spent some time playing with the Mambo content management system. First I built the sample module as described in the developer documentation. After finding out that was only for creating modular blocks on the page, I decided I needed to learn how to build components. Components are the actual applications that are run in the main content area. They include an administrative component and a publicly viewable component.

So I started with a test component called PeopleBook. This is basically a contact management system which allows you to create a fancy address book. The first thing I tried was changing the name of the component to differentiate it from the original. I’ve got 99% of it completed and working but there is one last bug that I can’t seem to knock out. One of the old table names I had used is still recognized by my mambo installation. Even though I changed the name everywhere in my code, uninstalling and reinstalling the component doesn’t clear up the error. I am wondering if there is something that I might have missed. Maybe the tablename is stored in the database and needs to be deleted.

Other than that, I was pretty impressed with the component and module installation. The integration and modularity of the system is pretty well. It is extremely easy to setup and configure custom modules and components. It’s too bad that writing the actual components was not as easy. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it in a little bit.

Recently, I was looking for a project management solution. I was searching for something easy-to-use, cheap and robust (isn’t that always the case?) To my surprise, there are not a lot of good options available. While there are a lot of open-source project management applications, I was having a lot of trouble finding a free web application that would allow me to create and manage a project.

When I say manage, I mean a complete project management solution which has many of the features of a community portal. I wanted something that had the ability to create and manage blogs, discussion forums, a calendar of events, wiki, surveys and polls. It seems that there just isn’t anything like that available. This of course seems to me like the perfect opportunity.

So a while back, I started building a new web application using PHP and MySQL. I developed a simple framework that made creating web forms and managing content a breeze. I have nearly finished a beta version of a wiki, survey, forums and a calendar of events. With the additions of blogs and polls and a little cleanup here and there, I will be ready to launch. The new site will be hosted at www.teamtask.com when it is done. For now, I have just posted a blog to track the progress of development from here on out.

Today, I finished building a link directory for Orvado.
It only took about 6 hours to build the whole thing including back-end administration. That is mainly because I have a library of code which I can draw upon which allows me to build applications quickly.

The application includes a SQL Server backend and a process whereby people can submit their sites for inclusion in the directory. I am part of a link exchange program right now, and the primary use will be for hosting links to other sites. Having the links organized by category, makes your site friendlier to search engines.

I had originally planned to have the category pages named something relevant that looked relatively static (like web_hosting.html.) However, IIS has limitations on including dynamic content (.asp pages) on static pages (.html pages.) This will be a future task for me as I struggle to understand the mysteries of how search engines work.

Go check out the Orvado Directory now!

Lately I have been fighting with a PHP conversion of my web sites. There’s a lot of work left to do until I get the site up and running the way that I’d like. For now, let me take this opportunity to discuss some of the things that really irk me about PHP.

• Case-sensitive variables
• Case-sensitive form and query variables
• either array_key_exists or mysql_fetch_assoc doesn’t work properly, because my null fields are nowhere to be found.
• Warning messages when referencing a hash array element that doesn’t exist
• No application-scoped variable (you have to use the shared memory module as a work-around)
• Include paths for the “require” and “include” statements. (shouldn’t the web site root automatically be appended to the search path?)
• No function to take the difference of two dates in a unit such as days, hours or minutes. (yeah, I’m too lazy to convert from seconds)

This is just a few of the problems I have encountered so far. I’m sure there will be more. On the plus side, I have been really impressed with the large amount of functions that are available. It really helps when developing complex applications. And of course the cross-platform (runs on Windows or UNIX) is a definite added bonus.

I’ve noticed that SixApart has been publishing a lot of press releases lately and it is interesting to see how their company has grown from a “mom-and-pop” shop to an international organization. According to their Web site, they have offices in San Francisco, London and Tokyo. This is no doubt due to a large sum of money given to them by a venture capitalist to the tune of 11.5 million.

You know, blog software is not all that hard to write – I have essentially done the same thing with my ASP Nuke web portal software. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular and this year should see an explosion of growth. That’s why I’ve decided to come up with a blogging service of my own.

It will take quite a bit of time to develop, but I will hopefully have something usable in the next couple of months. It might be a challenge because I’ve decided to program the service entirely in PHP on a UNIX platform instead of our standard Windows/ASP. It will be a good experience though and I thing the performance will be quite good. Plus, if I want to super-charge my application, I might consider porting the PHP code to a compiled Apache module written in C.

Today, I started a trial Adwords campaign on google to promote my company’s hosting services. Yes, I actually plunked down some money for some advertising but nothing like the expensive rates that are offered by Overture. I may be advertising with overture soon if Google doesn’t work out too well.

At the same time, I also updated our main business site by putting a series of boxes at the bottom of our home page detailing the hosting packages that are available. By clicking on an individual plan, you can view more details about what the plan has to offer. I am gradually adding more and more content to the site to make it a more useful resource for web developers and web site owners.

Today marks the launch of the official MSN search site. It has been in beta for quite some time now and it is good to see that Microsoft has finally launched their site. I think they did the right thing by leaving it in beta for so long to make sure they work out all of the bugs.

I caught some sort of flu bug the other day so I took the day off of work today. I was barely able to sleep last night so I spent a lot of today just catching up on some sleep. I hope that I will be able to go back to work tomorrow since I got somoe work to catch up on.

On a side note, I just saw someone post on the Web Pro Forums that there is no need to submit your site to a billion different search engines. Good search engines need to find your site on their own for fast inclusion.

I always noticed that the Google spider does a complete crawl of your site only once a month. This explains why some of the newly created pages on my site weren’t showing up. More information from Google is available describing what you need to do to make your site “search engine friendly” and also includes valuable information about Page Rank and the GoogleBot spider.

It’s hard to create a linking campaign for your site when Google doesn’t even index your site properly. Maybe Google has something against me. Even though the Google spider comes to visit my web site every few days, it is very slow on indexing new pages. My best guess is that I need to work on the popularity of my site before all of my pages are indexed.

I didn’t even know my page was not indexed yet until a link exchange sent me a message saying that they couldn’t post a reciprocal link because my link page wasn’t being indexed by Google. Sure enough, after checking google, I found that the page was not there. Oddly enough, a page right before it had been indexed.

Just as I was writing this blog, inspiration hit me! It could be that the path to the page is too deep. It is two folders deep right now and the Google spider seems to index everything at the top or “one folder deep”. Excuse me while I go re-organize my site and try to get my new pages indexed!

Today I continued my research into Internet marketing by studying up on banner advertising. Some pundits have claimed that banner advertising was dead because people just ignore them nowadays. Although, recent study has shown that they still work (although probably not as well as they used to.) The banner site on this blog is my first banner ad that I’ve made to promote Orvado Technologies, my web development and hosting company.

As part of my study, I am putting together a lot of useful information on a wiki site. For now it is going to be a private site since I plan to put some company secrets on there. I find it is a good way to create a common area to collect useful bits of wisdom. I can refer back to this as necessary to find information that I have previously discovered on the Internet.

As part of my continued research and learning, I am going to work on a banner exchange network. While I am developing the site, I will be working on a promotion for the site. The site is going to be totally unique and won’t be the standard 2-for-1 banner exchange network. Please stay tuned here for more information.