News
Aug 8, 2009 - New Projects Completed
It's been a while since my last update, but I have been busy and completed a number of new projects including flat xHTML/CSS sites and PHP/MySQL CMS driven sites. See the projects page for more details.
Also I have gone over a number of the sites in my portfolio to make sure they all meet XHTML 1.0 Strict guidelines using the W3C Markup Validation Service, which is reasonably reliable. There are only a few instances that the sites checked didn't validate such as when using Google Maps.
Finally please view www.soEmo.co.uk which has been completely re-designed, more features added and the coding generally improved.
May 24, 2009 - Deepblue Records CMS
A CMS built using PHP and MySQL has been integrated into the Deepblue Records website. This will make updating the site much easier and the server more organised. Deepblue can now add (inc. artist and cover images), edit and delete discog items.
The discog items use a paging function and had to be carefully integrated with the previous static items. The latest 3 records are displayed on the homepage and random ones displayed in other areas of the site.
There is scope to extend the CMS in the future for other areas of the site.
Apr 16, 2009 - Site Fully Database Driven
This site is now fully database driven with a basic admin system. It is not updated that regularly, but I had some spare time so took the opportunity to put my skills into practice.
News items can be added, edited and deleted.
Gallery images can be added, edited and deleted split into albums.
The news admin uses a set of buttons that allow you to insert HTML tags into the textarea. This is based on JS Quicktags.
Security aspects have been considered even though they are not particularly required on the site. These include using the PHP functions htmlentities, sprintf and mysql_real_escape_string and session tokens on the forms to combat Cross-site request forgery (CSRF).
The following resources proved useful:
phpsec.org/projects/guide/1.html
www.phpfreaks.com/tutorial/php-security
www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/05/09/validate-your-input
ha.ckers.org/xss.html
The site is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. The sitepoint article titled
"New-Window Links in a Standards-Compliant World" proved useful.
The .htaccess file has been improved to Redirect old indexed pages to new ones, Redirect non-www to the www version, Redirect index to root, Rewrite test.php to test.htm, and a couple more specific ones...
The following resources proved useful:
www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/web-redirection.shtml
corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php
www.moreniche.com/tutorials/htaccess-seo-basics.php
Other improvements include the addition of a favicon, robots.txt file, more header images, better Meta data, latest projects and a link to my StumbleUpon profile.
Hosting has been moved over to my Lunarpages account where unlimited add-on domains are possible.
Future work includes re-organising the scripts to fix the issue of "Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by ..." when uploading images. (sorted 17/05/09)
Also I plan to refresh my knowledge from University of object-oriented programming (OOP) and put it into practice.
Dec 16, 2008 - LRCC Now Database Driven
The Ludlow Radio Car Club site hadn't been given much attention for ages. Many skills have been learnt since which has resulted in numerous improvements.
The coding has been generally tidied up and URL rewrites put in place. These changes should hopefully aid SEO to some extent. A database has been created for the addition of a basic admin system, which allows content to be updated and handles the gallery images. This is a welcome inprovement as the site is updated weekly with the latest news, results, images etc.
Feb 24, 2008 - soEmo.co.uk Proving Popular Already
soEmo.co.uk - UK Emo Community is successfully progressing making all the time and effort worthwhile.
Users can now join the online community, make their own profiles and interact with others. soEmo.co.uk already has 65 active members.
Google Analytics is checked regularly, which displays some very interesting and useful site traffic statistics. The daily number of visits has recently shot up to over 200. The highest so far was 327 on Feb 22.
There is a significant number of improvements still to implement. A continued enthusiasm for the site means additions are always being added to the 'To Do' list for soEmo.co.uk
Furthermore, the site has hardly been promoted yet so it will hopefully get increasingly more popular, successful and useful for the emo scene.