Well, I finally have the photo galleries in some semblance of order. They are by no means complete, but they are usable. I can now upload some of the decent shots I take on my Digital Elph. Now, time to learn more about the camera so people might actually want to look at what I post.
Web Development
Address Book
Well, in building thebrightwells.com I decided to build an address book from scratch utilizing PHP and MySQL.
All in all I’m pretty proud of the progress I’ve made on it, other than a few stupid mistakes (luckily Matt W. pointed out an extra comma which drove me nuts for a good 45 minutes), I learned a lot in a short time.
The biggest issue was the fact that neither the MySQL, nor the PHP book sitting upon my shelves presented some of the key concepts in a manner that would make sense to me. After combing through a ton of online tutorials and gathering the occasional glimmer of knowledge I made my way down to Borders to pick up Beginning PHP 4.
The book was well worth the money as I was able to complete the entry editing and deleting functionality after reading two of the chapters.
Somehow I have managed to get myself into a position where I have to learn (or expand my knowledge of) several technologies in a short amount of time. It feels great. As Gunny Ermey would say “Ooorah!”
Beginning PHP4
I just picked up this book today to help me with the address book project I’m doing for the Brightwells. It looks like it will prove quite helpful. And, if my 20 minute perusal of its contents at Borders is any indication it should fill in the gaps left by my other PHP book (A Programmer’s Introduction to PHP 4.0).
For some reason the Amazon information to the right is pulling the wrong book. The right one is here.
Wired News
Finally, a major site shifts to standards support. Check out Wired’s new look, and if you are a Web Designer, Developer, Master, Producer, Enthusiast take a look at the source code. The markup is quite beutiful, and other than the code written by ad-serving middleware is perfectly compliant with Web standards. I can’t fault them for the non-compliant code as they don’t control Doubleclick’s output.
It is hard to ensure a site remains standards compliant from day to day. If you use any middleware programs you introduce the risk of some code slipping in that is improper, and though some great tools output valid XHTML, it only takes one mistake in your templates to throw everything off.
Support of Web standards is a double-edged sword as you are building future-compatibility at the risk of losing some backward-compatibility. I do my best to write code that works for both. Utilizing PHP and other server-side technologies, I insert blocks of code tailored for certain browser/OS combinations. This adds a bit of time to the development and testing phases of the process, but I think standards compliancy a worthwhile pursuit.
Congrats Wired! I hope you will be a beacon to the other large sites.
MySQL
MySQL is a technology with which I have dabbled for years but until now I have not had the ability to dive into it. I finally have access to an account where I can create multiple databases to learn how to utilize the database and the various technologies which can tie into it.
I’ve decided to build an address book for thebrightwells.com as my first real MySQL project. Should prove to be a great learning experience.
meyerweb
This is Eric Meyer’s Web Journal. The name may be familiar to you, and for good reason; Eric is considered a DHTML/CSS guru and is a major standards advocate. I recently purchased his book Eric Meyer on CSS which has paid for itself several times over already.
His site is proving quite the good read as well.