Socglue

Very busy still working on socglue.com

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 07:04:00 +0000

Very busy but I still work on socglue.com when possible. Despite there being a downturn in the US economy, I am not seeing any signs of slowdown in the web development sector. People are wanting more complex websites that pretty give them that "Easy" button to press.

I am trying to figure out how to program the "Easy Money" button so I have more time for socglue.com.

Anyways have a nice day!

Working on new features again!

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:31:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

I am working on the new features for socglue.com. Things were delayed quite a bit as the workload at work was very high and I have been upgrading my house a bit (last person in the house REALLY liked wallpaper). I have some cool AJAX features I am going to add, along with a video upload and video album section.

I am also experimenting with position sorting through mouse click and drags of photos, videos, blogs to display favorite photos and video very easily.

Additionally, I am creating a few new rapid deployment architectures for several other facets of the website so I can bust out fully functioning and interesting new modules in 1-2 hours.

More to come on SocGlue.com soon!

Work, Work, Work

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:08:00 +0000

Very busy at work lately. Managed to squeak in a few more bits of functionality for SocGlue over the weekend. I am currently working on getting the profile pages up to snuff. Users can now set their background on the profile page, and I plan on adding font customization, along with translucency to sections of the profile page. Also, I am planning on adding more AJAX functionality to the website to add a bit more zing and bling.

More new features are coming soon!

Work on socglue continues...

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:42:00 +0000

Well its been awhile since my last post. I have been very busy doing many things. Look for a house, and the masters course at Arizona State University, and working full time pretty much takes up all of my time.

I am working on finishing a few more key items for SocGlue so people will have an interest in it beyond their first visit. So far, it has been a great tool for keeping track of events and life, but I am working on bringing in the interaction with societies into play; One of the main reasons for starting this website.

Besides socglue.com, I took a look at using SOAP with PHP. It makes sense for interfacing with large systems out there that need to maintain a standard for receiving and transmitting data for various programming languages. Although I would say, I still prefer CURL posting over SOAP, the libraries involved are easy to understand and only took a couple minutes to set up a server and client testbed.

As a programmer(and realize, I did software development for 5 or 6 years before getting into web development), I am at a point where I realize that I can program whatever I want, but also know how much work it takes. You can only take on so much work before you need to seek the manpower from others. If anyone out there reads this, is interested in further developing socglue, and knows LAMP architecture and Agile programming, let me know!

New Additions to socglue.com!

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:58:00 +0000

I have updated the photo albums on socglue.com so they are easy to use and viewing the pictures in an album is a snap. I contemplated writing my own picture viewing mechanism, but I found a really nice implementation called Lightbox and decided to integrate that into socglue.com. It uses the script.aculo.us javascript library, which I was originally going to use before I found Lightbox.

I will put in the user profile pages soon; I don't know how many times I have created a profile page on a zillion different web applications, but I have been incredibly busy with several other projects. This weekend, there will be a profile page up on Socglue! And with a little luck, some basic customizations for the webspace, and the friends implementation.

New Additions to socglue.com!

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:58:00 +0000

Socglue here we come

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:28:00 +0000

Ok I have had many events take precedence over adding functionality for socglue.com, but things are finally starting to settle down a bit, so I will add some more features to socglue.com this week.

Included is a comments system, profile, and, if time goes well, specialized customizable web spaces for each user. I am still tinkering with the design for web spaces because that area, if not moderated well, will have multiple security holes, and I am not interested in making socglue.com unstable.

I will also be updating the editor for blog and article posting.

More PHP development with PEAR, Smarty, mySQL

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:23:00 +0000

Socglue.com news:
I have been continually adding more features to socglue.com. All items are coming together and I hope to begin users' web spaces early next week. I have been extremely busy writing spiders and other nifty little scripts in order to facilitate the smooth operation of the website as it grows.

I am taking care to make sure that people (mainly teenagers) are safer on socglue.com than has been the case with other website societies. Of course, everything can not be moderated unless I hire an individual to constantly administer and check data for contact information. Chat is probably one of the worst source for predators online and, for this reason, will likely to be axed.

Videos are now able to be posted in the blogs. I am working on updating to the latest version of FCKEditor to allow easy addition of flash videos through the editor. As far as other video types are concerned, I will most likely be programming a plugin for this.

Other items:
I was searching around on the NBA on the Phoenix Suns website, since they are my favorite NBA team, and noticed a typical browser compatibility error in their menu system. It is amazing how many people are still employing quasi web developers that just use third party applications to create websites. Anyways if anyone is interested, the menu does not display correctly for "Player News & Features" under the "News" menu.

The information on that website is a bit scattered and not geared real well towards a devout Phoenix Suns fan, so I did a bit more searching and found a great blog, Phoenix Suns Rising,that has a great spin on the latest happenings with the Phoenix Suns. The content is good, entertaining, and its a great place to converse with other die hard Phoenix Suns fans.

Blogs and News Updates to SocGlue.com

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:07:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 05:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 15:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Socglue) — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 22:30:00 +0000

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