Strange Ramblings » Coding

New PHP Tutorial

Chris — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:12:03 +0000

Well, I finally got around to writing another tutorial after all this time. And, guess what? It’s my first PHP tutorial. It covers protecting your website from spam attacks, specifically for custom made websites. If you’ve got a few seconds to spare and are a developer, give it a read. It’ll make me happy. <3

In other news, I ship out on the 18th for football… Life is about to get real interesting. Hopefully I can keep up with everything that is going on, both online and offline.

Time to use this blog…

Chris — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:51:53 +0000

I fail quite often at using my blog it seems. I never really get around to writing stuff again after I previously wrote something… I just forget. And when I do remember, I just don’t feel like writing anything. We’ll see if I can change this again in the future, but I get the feeling that won’t be the case.

Anyways, today’s entry is about a new feature we just released at SZ. It’s called “Achievements.” It’s similar to the system that Steam, XBox Live, and PSN all use… except it’s for a forum system instead of games. It’s a bit of a twist, but we figured it’d be fun and could prove to be interesting. It also accompanies the points system quite well by giving members alternate methods of earning points.

In essence, the system is just another way to let our members have fun. It gives them something to set their sight on while posting around the forum. It gives them a goal to attempt to obtain. And this goal, besides bragging rights, also gives them points, the monetary system of the Studio. They can then redeem their points for different bonuses around the forum, such as a custom title or colored name. So, the whole process is rewarding our members for aiding the studio.

On top of all that, some of the achievements are kinda fun. It’s going to prove a challenge for some of the members to have a conversation with Team Studio, the vacant admin account, to rickroll both Scorpian and myself, or to annoy Fredy. The achievements system is kind of a trial run, but I think we can expect to see it stick around the Studio for quite a while.

Anyways, that’s it for now… maybe I’ll blog about something else in the near future. Maybe.

Tutorials now online

Chris — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:46:50 +0000

Well, I’m bored, and when I’m bored, I do things. Today, I put all my (useful) tutorials in some pages on my blog. I figured I’d also take advantage of the fun syntax highlighter I dug up. It seems to be working well and I can’t complain. Hopefully someone will actually use these tutorials. =P It’d make the work worth it.

So yeah, that’s all for now. I hope to transfer my snippets library from the old blog to here sometime soon.

Aptana IDE

Chris — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:59:47 +0000

I was reading an entry in Peter’s Blog about developing with Adobe AIR. (It is actually linked to yet another blog.) Anyways, on this other blog entry I was reading and the author mentioned an IDE program called Aptana IDE. I decided I should probably try other IDEs than my handy Notepad++, so I downloaded the program and installed it. Currently, I think the IDE is actually quite nice and I plan to use it for development of client-side scripts for a while. If I don’t like it, I can always go back to Notepad++.

My only complaint about Aptana is that it doesn’t have large support for PHP past syntax highlighting. Oh well, not much that you can do about that. It is still quite a nice IDE.

PHPOmaha

Chris — Fri, 25 May 2007 23:43:00 +0000

So, I was at the state math team practice the other day, and when leaving I saw a poster for “PHPOmaha.com” I read it the poster quickly and saw it was a group of people trying to get together to discuss PHP, AJAX, etc. I decided to check it out, since you know, it sounded interesting. The next meeting is June 7th and so far I plan to attend. No reason not to since school gets out the 6th and it could be a good chance to learn some stuff.

There’s some professional programmers and some free lance web designers who plan to attend/have attended, so it could be an interesting learning experience and a good insight into what web design could be like as a future career. They also plan to discuss things such as using the Smarty template system, the Cake PHP library, and the use of AJAX in web development. It all sounds interesting to me, and at worst I waste 2 hours of my life. =P