Blogging Archive

Another redesign, quick style

By
Andy
 – October 27, 2005Posted in: Blogging, Web Development

I´ve got thousands of sites to look after but I do have a few personal ones as well. Two of them are "blogs" (one actually is – this one, the other one is more for fun: Welly´s World), but the third one is just a basic site promoting PHP development services.

 
I use this one as my home page since it has links to the stuff I use regularly and is fast to load. Only problem is that it´s had the same design for over three years now and apart from the fact that all the code is pretty naff, I´ve got bored of looking at it a couple of hundred times a day. A redesign was in order! I like it anyway.

That was a quick site overhaul

By
Andy
 – October 26, 2005Posted in: Blogging, Web Development

We decided to do a quick redesign of all of our training sites. Andrew came up with the designs in Fireworks and mailed them across to me to do the coding. I had wanted to recode one of the training sites anyway including some re-writing of URLs and re-ordering the code to try and boost the SERPs.
 
I started this and after about half a day I was only about a quarter the way through. Then we decided to apply the new design to this site as well and since it is very similar code to the other ones it only took me about two hours to apply the new design and effectively optimise the entire site. Saved a load of time anyway!

Image Verification and Comment Spam

By
Andy
 – September 14, 2005Posted in: Blogging, Email & Spam

This blog and a few others that people I know use are run off php scripts that I wrote. Instead of an all-singing all-dancing set of scritps I´ve generally just added bits to it when it´s been needed.

 
The latest problem we´ve had is comment spam. I haven´t bothered to track down who it was but the content was always MIME code (the stuff emails are made up of) which doesn´t really make sense since most comment spam is used to boost a sites serps. I have finally got around to sorting it out though.
 
Now all the post´s comment forms have one of those images where you have to enter the string of characters into the box to enter a comment. It´s all done by through php which randomly generates a string of characters, creates an image with the string in it, outputs the image to the browser and then destroys it. It also stores the string in a session variable and then when someone submits a comment it checks that what they´ve entered to see if it matches what is stored in the session. If not it outputs an error message. Job done.
 
Now lets see how long it is until some bored script kiddie reads this and tries to hack it!

Time to update my blogging code

By
Andy
 – August 30, 2005Posted in: Blogging

This blog, another one of mine and a few other people that I know run their blogs off this code that I´ve written. It´s not exactly feature rich but it does the job.
 
One of the things it does do is send out an email to people who´ve "subscribed" to it when I make a post. Only problem is that some of these people don´t check their email as quickly as I post, especially if I post a couple of times in one day. A few of them have asked if I can get it to only send them one email in a day. Sounds reasonable and will be fairly easy so think that´ll be next on my list of things to do.

 
Ask and you shall receive!

The most boring post ever!

By
Andy
 – June 29, 2005Posted in: Blogging

The isn´t a real post in that I´ve got something to report, it´s just that the blog runs off my own custom code and I´ve made some changes to the backend and need to test it by adding a new post and couldn´t think of anything to put.

 
On hindsight I could delete this post but now I´ve typed a whole paragraph I don´t want to!

Yet another work distraction!

By
Andy
 – February 23, 2005Posted in: Blogging

I was messing around the other day at the derby web devlopment company I work at, looking for something fun to do (not that writing sql backup programs isn´t fun!) and decided to start a blog.
 
Instead of using existing software, I decided to develop my own – and here it is!
 
I´ll be posting here quite regularly about the various development challenges I face, projects I´m working on and other web development related…. stuff!

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