Blogs and News Updates to SocGlue.com

In my decreasingly spare amount of time, I have managed to add image linking in the blogs and news sections.

I will develop a method for image linking the photos from the photo albums on socglue to the blogs without having to copy and paste the url (unless the user is linking to a photo that does not come from his/her photo album.

In other development projects, I wrote a web spider the other day. It was not as bad as I originally thought, and has proven to be quite useful. I found some good information on the do's and dont's of search engine optimization.

Full steam ahead!

Socglue: The reason why.

I failed to mention the main premise of creating SocGlue.com. The original motivation for developing this website is for having a place to store photo albums of my son. Without this, there would not be any SocGlue.com.

Another underlying reason is that I see websites becoming more functional and more sophisticated, but I rarely see websites that are programmed to handle large scale user management and high traffic loads. Most developers that I know have fallen into programming with an IDE; Great if you are doing a simple "Mom & Pop" or "Just for fun" website, but an absolute catastrophe waiting to happen if you are planning to support hundreds or thousands of users. It is the maintenance and upgradability where many websites fail, and why web development outsourcing just does not work for websites requiring user login, reports, bank accounts.

To be a highly successful web development contractor with medium to high complexity websites, you must be:

A) A good communicator
B) Know how to satisfy your clients, which sometimes includes sacrificing awesome code structure to meet a deadline BUT maintaining enough modularity to make the code awesome later, when large scalability requirements start to kick in).
C) A great programmer (ie. use classes, write modular and readable code)

SocGlue.com is my attempt to let the world know what a truly powerful, large scale website can be. It is a modular website, designed for a large scale user base the beginning, taking into consideration the scalability of databases, content, and look & feel, and Search Engine Optimization (as the equation for ranking on search engines is always changing).

I am reaching out to the world by letting them decide how the website will ultimately turn out (this is what the feedback section is for). If the mass public wants a certain feature, they will have it on Socglue.com. For now I have implemented a simple blog, photo albums, and a news section for users to post interesting worldly articles online.

Coming soon will be individual web spaces for users where they will be able to customize look & feel without having to know an inkling of HTML.

PHP development of Socglue.com

I am programming SocGlue.com with PHP. After programming in C++ and Java, it was a natural choice to fall into this programming language . In my experience programming, I have leaned towards open source solutions since day one. I first began writing software applications in 1993; There really was not an effective drag and drop IDE for creating a piece of software quickly.

My transition from solely programming software applications to including web applications occurred when there was a drought with software development at my job. I decided to pick up on web development, as there were numerous clients in need of a website, and I needed something to fill the programming gap. After researching some of the backend web development languages, PHP was the logical choice since its syntax for object oriented programming was similar, and the class object layout was very easy to understand. Furthermore, using the PEAR DB library made life much easier pulling objects from a mySQL database. Smarty templates was the final piece of the puzzle to acheive a versatile web app, which I will write more about later...

Socglue blog #1

This blog is dedicated to keeping track and recording the progress of Socglue.com