Recently I finally decided to take some time to learn Python. So I figured the best way to learn something new is to dive right in and write an application. This application happened to be a new server for Computer Science House's networking vending machine(s) 'Drink'. The general idea behind Drink is that it's a 'communal refrigerator' for CSH that the members 'donate' money to in order to stock it with delicious drinks (such as Coke products since RIT is exclusively a Pepsi campus). Being the ...
Search Results
Every time I make a new website with a user registration, I usually end up using a reCaptcha somewhere in the process. A while ago, I discovered a reCaptcha library on the Codeigniter forums. And since then, Ive modified it a little bit to work with Codeigniter 2.0 and have placed it on Github where everyone can access it....
So after putting a few months of work into it, I have finally launched ClientMeetFreelancer.com. In short, Client Meet Freelancer is a site dedicated to bringing freelancers and potential clients together without the fees and hassles of other freelancer job boards. I decided to take an Agile/Lean approach to it and have launched it with the minimum features I thought were necessary for the site to get off the ground and still be very useful. Other fe...
When it comes to web application performance, often times your database will be the largest bottleneck and can really slow you down. So how can you speed up performance when you have a site or application that is constantly hitting your database to either write new data or to fetch stored data? One of the easiest ways is to cache the data that is accessed the most. Today, I cam going to show you a brief example of how to do this with Memcached using PHP and th...
When it comes to scaling a web application, one of the easiest ways to boost performance is with an asynchronous queue. Since web apps have started to become as complex as native desktop applications, users are expecting them to perform like such. This is where using asynchronous queues comes in to play. Typically with high traffic sites like Facebook, digg, twitter, et al, not everything needs to happen instantaneously, it just needs to look like it. For example, when you choose to send a mess...
All this time, Ive been creating libraries for Codeigniter and talking about its features and whats so awesome about it, but Ive never actually explained what Codeigniter is. So some of you might be looking at the GCal Library I wrote and be like "what the hell is this guy talking about??". So Ive decided that I should probably do a mini series of blog posts, introducing the Codeigniter Framework and even do a couple of tutorials on how to start developing with it.
First of, what is Cod...
Being Thanksgiving break and all, I figured Id work on my CMS a little more and add in some features. One of the features that Ive been thinking of implementing has been one that tweets your blog post when you publish it. Being that twitter limits you to 140 characters and my URL's are rather long, I figured Id make a mini Codeigniter library for URL shortening. I started out by checking out the two more popular services, Bit.ly and TinyURL. As i...
This past Thursday Google made public the source code to its new operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome OS is based on Linux, and based on some poking around under the hood, that flavor of Linux seems to be a mix of Debian's unstable and testing versions "squeeze" and "sid". But more on tha...
So this week kicked off the first of the (hopefully) many installments of the CSH Seminar Series. This week we were gracious enough to have Kevin Purdy one of the senior editors of Lifehacker.com give us a talk on comments on the internet and how sites like Lifehacker and other blogs and social bookmaking sites deal with user comments, especially the really bad ones. We even got into a little bit of a discussion of...
So I was playing around with the Google Calendar portion of the Gdata API the other day and did some searching and found that there wasnt a Codeigniter library for it, probably because it seems that Google has teamed up with the guys that are working on the Zend Framework to bring Gdata to the PHP world. So I took the ZendGdata API for Google Calendar and implemented it in Codeigniter so that you just need to make a few simple function calls to gain authorization to a calendar, add events, query...
