Month: December 2007

Happy New Year and Happy Coding in 2008

2007 is finally winding down, with everyone getting ready to welcome the new year.  It’s  been a full and busy year for me, and as always, life has taken away from the time to code and build projects.  But I did uncover a lot of interesting resources and stuff that have given me ideas for projects for the new year.   All I have to do now is make time and get the ball rolling.  One of my goals for 2008 is to do more of the things I enjoy for the heck of it, so here’s to more coding, more discovery, more ideas, and more more more fun.

Happy New Year and Happy Coding!!

Open source web templates and free scripts

We’ve talked before about using content management systems, whether database-based or flat-file. As you may know, some of the CMS’s out there are very powerful and can be used to create some amazing websites and communities. In a previous post I talked about the simplicity and ease of using a flat-file CMS.

Another option for creating a website, apart from hand coding it yourself, is to use templates and build on them. To this end, I want to share with you two wonderful resources I discovered the other day. I am going to be exploring and using these resources myself and you may see me mention them again, but in this post I just want to introduce them.

The first is the Open Source Web Design project. Open Source Web Design is a site where you can download free web design templates and share yours with others. The goal is to help make the internet a prettier place, and the templates you find there are really nice to look at, and can inspire you with a slew of ideas. As of this post, there are currently 2080 free designs for you to download and play with. If you download and use one of the templates, make sure you read and adhere to the Usage Agreement and the copyright information of each template.

The second resource that I want to share with you today is the Dynamic Drive DHTML and Javascript Code Library. This is one of my favorite places to find and download free, original DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and Javascript scripts to enhance your web site. Some of the scripts you will find on this website include:

* Calendars
* Date & Time
* Document Effects
* Dynamic Content
Iframe & Ajax,
* Form Effects
* Games
* Image Effects
Galleries, Mouseover, Slideshows
* Links & Tooltips
* Menus & Navigation
CSS Based, Multi-levels
* Mouse and Cursor
* Scrollers
* Text Animations
* User/System Preference
* Window and Frames
* XML and RSS

and others.

Between these two resources, you may be able to come up with some ideas for projects in the new year.

Why I love Akismet!

I love Akismet because it has saved me a lot of time and ibuprofen (that I would be taking for the headaches I would get trying to ward off spammers. Here’s why:

Akismet Spam

Now this blog hasn’t been around for that long, considering that I made my first post on June 13 of this year, and I haven’t been posting as regularly as I would like, so to have been hit with that amount of spam in such a short time is something to think about!

Let’s think about this for a few minutes: This blog has been online for about 6 months now, that’s approximately 180 days, give or take. If you do the math, you find that this comes to about 8 spam messages a day!! Wow!!

Since I have comment moderation turned on, without Akismet I would be getting on average 8 emails a day to moderate comments on this blog alone!

Do you see now why I love Akismet?

If you have a WordPress blog, make sure that you enable Akismet, it will save you lots and lots of time!

Venturing into flat-file Content Management Systems

Life has been busy with school and all taking up an inordinate amount of my time. However, I have also been playing around with some small coding projects. I have some big ideas but they’re going to need a lot of time to build. I realized that to get these projects off the ground I’ll need to really buckle down and work on my PHP coding skills, so these projects will have to wait till next year.

Apart from that, I’ve been working on some small website projects using PHP, and one thing I’ve been playing with is the concept of flat-file content management systems. These are content management systems that don’t use a database to store information, but instead, the information is stored in text files. If you have worked with any of the database-based content management systems before, such as Joomla, Mambo, or MODX, you know that they are pretty heavy duty, and sometimes resource hungry because of all the utility and functionality that the try to provide.
Flat file CMS’s are ideal for smaller websites that don’t require loads of information to be pulled from many different places at the same time. Since I am just starting to explore these kinds of systems, all I want to do in this post is introduce the concept to you and explain why I think it’s such an attractive option. Here are advantages, I am finding, of using a flat-file CMS:

  1. I don’t need a database – This is useful because one of the hosting accounts I use offers only a limited number of mySQL databases, but unlimited add-on domains. So I can reserve the mySQL databases for my bigger websites and use flat-file CMSs for my smaller websites. With today’s ever-expanding hosting solutions, this might not be an issue for most people, but it’s definitely an advantage to keep in mind.
  2. Installation is easy – Flat-file CMSs are a breeze to install and setup, since all the configuration information is in easily accessible files.
  3. Updates are easy -Unlike most major CMSs where updates involve going back and figuring out what to do with all your plugins, and what files had you edited where, updating flat-file CMSs is a breeze since changes are usually to specific files and are easy to implement. And because you’re not working with databases, updates are an easy DIY task.
  4. Editing and tweaking is easy – Most of the flat-file CMSs that I have had a chance to glance at are written in PHP, so they are easy to figure out and tweak. As I mentioned in a previous post, playing with CMSs is a great way to master PHP.

There are a number of flat-file CMSs out there and I will be talking about them in future posts. The one that I am currently dabbling with is NanoCMS, a nice little flat-file CMS that is proving to be quite useful and easy to play with, so you may want to check it out if you need to whip up a quick website without much ado.