I’m happy to report the progress I’ve been making on my blog redesign project. So far I’m already in between steps 3 and 4 which is converting the Photoshop mockup into XHTML and CSS then coding it for Wordpress. I’m giving myself a deadline to launch my new redesign on or before August 12.

I’m really excited about this project because this would be my first time in theme designing then coding it for Wordpress. After this project I would expect to learn more on creating themes faster with good quality if I plan to make a living off from it. hehehe.

I would really love to hear your comments and feedback on my design. Thank you.

The redesign process would go through the following process:

1. Design sketching
2. Sketch to Photoshop mockup
3. Photoshop mockup to XHTML and CSS
4. XHTML and CSS to Wordpress
5. Wordpress to my adoring readers!

I’m fairly confident that I will be successful with this project and after the relaunch I will decide whether to provide Wordpress development for you guys and gals! Please come back often to check the date of the relaunch. If you have any tips please share it because I badly need some.

Below is a recorded conversation between agent Mike and Mr. Rolling Pin. I guess our friend Mike didn’t have any sleep yet. hehehe.

I wrote this article after listening to a podcast hosted by Paul Boag and with his trusty sidekick Marcus Lillington. The podcast is based from Andy Budd’s topic entitled ‘What is Web 2.0?’ at the 2005 dConstruct conference.

Open Data

A Web 2.0 application is aware that the data you put into the system is your data. A classic example of this concept is YouTube. The videos that you upload to Youtube belongs to you and doesn’t belong to YouTube. YouTube only provides a service for you to upload and manage your videos. Another example of this concept are blogging services like Wordpress and Blogger. Their application only provides the system for you to manage your blog posts. The blog entries that you put in their system are your own data. ‘Open data’ revolves around the concept that if you put your data into the system, you should then be able to get it out from them if you decide to go with another application. ‘Open data’ also means giving users control over their sensitive data. Users should not have a hard time updating their email address, password and other information.

Architecture of Participation

Back then traditional websites are the only one delivering the information and content to the user. The user only gets to scan and read this information. Nowadays Web 2.0 sites encourages user participation meaning users can submit their own content to the website. The idea behind this is that the more people that contributes to the site the better the site becomes. An example of this concept is Wikipedia where the content is generated by users from around the world. Another example would be Digg where users vote for a website that gets to be promoted on Digg’s front page after it gets a certain amount of votes. Users can give their comments and feedbacks on products and articles which can help other users gain as much as information on a particular service or product.

Rich User Experience

This last area is probably the most obvious reason why people will categorize a website as being Web 2.0. Web 2.0 sites have a richer user experience meaning they have applications that behaves a lot like desktop applications. With the use of AJAX, users can use an application without the need of reloading the page. It is also important for developers to not use AJAX just for the sake of using it. They must also ensure that their application will not prevent users from using their applications when Javascript is turned off. Websites like Flickr and Facebook are great examples of AJAX-enabled websites.

In my opinion the Web 2.0 concept is really all about the users. Its about making the web a better place. Websites should go along with the users and not against them. Of course if you have any other thoughts of what a Web 2.0 site is and whats it supposed to be you’re welcome to share it here.

Having a broadband connection really sucks when you want to download torrent files because for some reason my Internet provider doesn’t support port forwarding which can really lead to slow torrent downloads. I don’t know how they do it but with FireTorrent I get steady download speeds and can almost be competitive with other torrent clients like UTorrent, BitComet and Azureus.

If you’re using Firefox and a heavy torrent user at the same time please do try FireTorrent. I highly recommend it! Please do comment because I would love to hear your experience on using FireTorrent.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel by coming up with another pagination script instead I will suggest that you checkout and try PHP Pagination Script from PHPSense. Its a PHP class that is very easy to integrate with your existing applications by following these few simple steps:

Step One: Include the pagingation class on the document that will output the long list of records.

//Include the Pagination class
include('ps_pagination.php');

Step Two: Create the pagination object. It expects four parameters:

• MySQL connection link
• SQL query
• Number of records to display per page. Defaults to 10
• Number of pagination links to display. Defaults to 5

include('ps_pagination.php');
 
//Connection to MySQL database
$conn = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password');
mysql_select_db('yourdatabase', $conn);
 
$query = "SELECT * FROM yourtable";
 
//Create the PS_Pagination object
$pager = new PS_Pagination($conn, $query, 10, 5);

Step Three: After creating the pagination object, call the paginate() function from the object. This function returns the paginated result set for the current page. You can use this result set just as you would use a standard MySQL result set.

include('ps_pagination.php');
 
//Connection to MySQL database
$conn = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password');
mysql_select_db('yourdatabase', $conn);
 
$query = "SELECT * FROM yourtable";
 
//Create the PS_Pagination object
$pager = new PS_Pagination($conn, $query, 10, 5);
$results = $pager->paginate();
 
//Loop through the result set
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)) {
echo $row['yourfield'];
}

Last step: Display the pagination links by calling the renderFullNav() function.

include('ps_pagination.php');
 
//Connection to MySQL database
$conn = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password');
mysql_select_db('yourdatabase', $conn);
 
$query = "SELECT * FROM yourtable";
 
//Create the PS_Pagination object
$pager = new PS_Pagination($conn, $query, 10, 5);
$results = $pager->paginate();
 
//Loop through the result set
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($results)) {
echo $row['yourfield'];
}
//Display the navigation
echo $pager->renderFullNav();

As you can see its very simple to use in your applications. Paginating pages is one of the most commonly requested functions in websites and this is one of the many scripts that can really help you with your projects. I have been looking for a pagination script for a while now and by far this is the best and most efficient pagination script I’ve used. As always feel free to suggest if you’re using any pagination scripts. Hoping to learn from you guys. Thanks for reading.

Thats when I decided to go back to PHP basics of sending email to check if the server is really capable of sending one. I opened up the PHP manual and used this basic code:

$to = 'nobody@example.com';
$subject = 'the subject';
$message = 'hello';
$headers = 'From: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
 
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Fortunately it worked. If that little snippet worked then I could replace the existing code from the plugin and replace it with this basic one because all the plugin has to do is send out an email. (I have to include headers because in some cases in different servers the PHP mail function wouldn’t work without it) I then opened up email.php (inside /wp-content/plugins/email/), went to line 881 then edited it to:

if (mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers)) {

Then just above it I declared the mail function variables and assigned the variables used in the plugin like this:

$to = $friendemail;
$subject = $template_email_subject;
$message = $template_email_bodyalt;
$headers = 'From: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
'Reply-To: webmaster@example.com' . "\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

Also don’t forget to set the send email method to “PHP” in the email options. This kind of editing will ignore the PHPMailer class that the plugin is using and hopefully send that email to your friend.

As always I’m open to your suggestions and violent reactions and if you know any other alternatives in tweaking WP-EMail please don’t hesitate to share it. Thanks for reading and you can see a live example of what I’ve discussed here.

Many thanks to Lester Chan for developing this great plugin! I hope to hear your thoughts regarding this fix.

One of the first thing he asked me was to play a groove so he could hear the crap that I will make. hehehe. But seriously he will point out the inconsistencies in your playing which will make you aware of the sound you’re making with the drums. We then proceeded with wrist stroke studies and some materials that basically lubricated my drumming gills. My first lesson with him started out real good and I know this will be the start of a good drumming comeback for me.

Having a good drum teacher and mentor can really help you a lot especially when seeking advice, how to execute things easier and a lot more. Make an investment to find one because this will help you in the long run.

When I switched to Ubuntu I avoided installing windows based software in Linux using Wine. I didn’t became comfortable with some of the Linux-based editors so I decided to install Dreamweaver in Ubuntu. I did a basic Google search and found this very practical way of installing Dreamweaver in Ubuntu. So without wasting any second I installed Dreamweaver using Wine and to my delight everything went okay.

I’m not expecting this would be the perfect setup for me but as of now everything is a-ok! I’m still on my quest to search for the holy grail of PHP editors! Until then… Happy coding!