redbullmarky

unfortunately, it's your reputation and portfolio that speaks. unfortunately in your case, the former is destroyed by a quick google search, the latter is destroyed by your own constant self-critique of your work as well as another quick google search. if i need help, the first tool i'll use to check out potential helpers is to look up what they've done and get a real idea of the person. However, in your hammering/pestering/harrassment of certain key Google individual(s) on their blog(s), you've pretty much drawn a dark picture of yourself as a person - a picture which many will not want to look past regardless of your experience or skillset when choosing people to do work for them. in the case of apologies, please remember that in the civilised parts of the world, it's "Innocent until proven guilty" and NOT "in my opinion, you're guilty until you prove me wrong."

traditionally, Feb 29th is the only day of the year when a female can propose to a male.

well now you're an SEO expert, maybe you could SEO yourself off the number 1 google item when searching for your name. stuff like that is just gonna harm your SEO career before it started, not to mention you threw many accusations against a member or two of these forums without definitive proof nor an apology afterwards....

congrats! i'm sure many of us who are avoiding the whole marriage thing will be bricking it as february 29th is drawing ever closer again....(me included hehe)

there: [quote author=LiamProductions link=topic=118552.msg632779#msg632779 date=1183204815] It has to be vBulletin, but if you download SMF you can customize it easy, except SMF login script is javascript  :P [/quote]

all three far from simple though...

i'd be more worried about holes that allow running of scripts anyway, but i can appreciate that it does happen.

depends what your distractions are. if it's your family, you need to discuss with them that they MUST leave you alone whilst you work - not even to ask you for a cup of tea or anything from the shop, etc. for general working at home, give yourself a proper start time and finish time and stick to them. there's nothing wrong with going through the "getting ready for work" process even if you only work in the back office or whatever. I cant remember exactly who, but I remember reading that an artist (possibly Van Gogh) used to get ready, kiss his wife goodbye, walk around the block and back home which signified the start of his day. ok, so maybe overkill - but you do need to get into the right frame of mind. working from home in general takes MUCH more discipline than working for an employer. give yourself also some time before and after work to wind up (getting your day/targets/times prepared) and wind down (tie up lose ends, prepare for following day, etc) so that you're not constantly thinking about work or that "it'll be ok, i'll leave this til tomorrow and go and play on the playstation or go out with friends" etc. everyone's different at the end of the day, so you need to quickly find what works best for you.

there's plenty to choose from, but the simplest (functional) one i'd recommend is CodeIgniter. Others are not massively difficult to use but CodeIgniter definitely one of the easiest i've played with.

first time i ever checked a big page of mine (before I'd even heard of validation and how important it was), i got over 200 errors/warnings on a single page. after thinking "oh bugger, this is gonna take all day to fix!" i thought i'd clean a few up, and do a few every day. only i realised that when i cleaned up a few of the reported issues, about 40 or 50 errors dropped of the list - so i got over 200 errors sorted in about 30 mins. moral of the story? it's bloody lazy not to validate your code considering the overall benefits to all users viewing your site. it doesnt take long. if you can't be arsed to dot your i's and cross your t's, then you're in the wrong industry. @Salis - no, you might not be programming an OS app. but what about people who visit your site that cant see it, that rely on a perfectly validating site to be able to use it like you and I? I'm a little tired of hammering this point home, but it gets overlooked each time, mostly by those that either aren't or don't know anyone with accessibility issues.

not a clue. considering it's nearly 5 years old, i'd stab a guess as no, but no harm in doing it anyway.

the main site and the forums currently do not share the same membership system.

if you need people to look beyond the login page, please provide a test username/password - else it could be seen as trying to get new members rather than a critique

i might be getting a little to worked up over nothing, but comments like this one annoy me - mainly because you're missing the point of why it's important. 1, it just looks more professional to have your code 100% validating (or at least as much as possible) 2, it has reasons to do with accessibility - ie, allowing people with special needs (notably visual) to get around your site easier. it's easy for many developers to forget about other users. 3, layouts support more browsers 4, promotes forward thinking and to an extent forces the browsers to get inline and follow the rules. 5, many errors are to do with missing alt tags. considering Google/MSN et al cannot "see" your images, why would you leave these out when it provides more content for engines to read??? why would you throw search engines and screen readers off the trail by not closing tags properly? etc etc the list goes on. personally, if i was to source in help for any projects, i wouldnt touch a developer with a bargepole if they had the whole attitude of "stuff the standards and the rules". they might as well go carry on with geocities or myspace as far as i'm concerned. i'm not perfect, as i've said before, but those with the whole "stuff the standards" and those that make no effort to try should really do something else other than web design and leave the art of making sites and pages to people who DO care. maybe then the net as a whole can move forward and everyone can equally and fairly access it, just like its original intention. *steps off soapbox*

absolutely. but providing an ALT tag is far more than just conforming to XHTML. To some people who turn off styles/images or use special types of screen reader, the ALT tag is the difference between someone using your site or not at all. They didnt just sit round a table saying "right then, what shall we do to make the life of developers harder. i know, LETS ADD SOME ALT TAGS! that'll fk them up!". probably more along the lines of "what attributes can we add to HTML that will enable those who may have limited/no eyesight to browse the web, as they perfectly have a right to. What can help make a screen reader "see" images ?" So in actual fact, statements like this are BS: not the error itself.... Think about everyone, simple as that.

rolling your own is pretty straightforward. Blogs seem to be the new "Hello World" these days. If you're not fussed about all that and want to get straight to the blog, then Wordpress or Serendipity are both pretty useful.

in no particular order, some more possible answers/thoughts: 1, a single database with properly thought out tables/relationships will be more than enough to handle a site and all that goes with it. so like buyocat says, joining tables (users/products, etc) via your queries is the way to go. 2, i tend to use a database table for tracking sessions, simply because it gives me more control. I can easily pull up a list of all users that are currently on line (like how a forum would) and even log users out if required. regular sessions are stored in files which, whilst it's still possible to do all of this, makes it much trickier. take a look at http://www.php.net/session_set_save_handler for more info on how to implement this one. 3, it's perfectly fine to store the DB username/password in your files, but with other things i tend to take extra steps to protect it a bit more as i'm pretty paranoid like that . i tend to be more comfortable moving ANY files that i dont want to ever be made available out of the web root (ie, above the public_html / www / htdocs / httpdocs or whatever your folder is called). PHP's file handling keywords (such as include) can access a file outside the webroot but any requests via the browser cant. This method comes in handy for preventing direct downloading of any uploaded content too via the use of header() and the other file handling functions such as fopen, file_get_contents, etc. hope that helps some

cake does have plenty of caching options (though how good they are i dont know, as i've never set them up and tried them yet) - might be worth having a look at the ones available - that'll help a little bit.

alot of information providers provide an API (Application Programming Interface) so that you can easy grab information from their site and put it on yours. Google maps is a good example of one. Amazon, too. Both these sites offer documentation on how to access their data and put it on your sites. try searching (just to demonstrate) "google maps api" or "amazon api" and you'll probably get a better idea of what you're looking for.... ultimately it depends on exactly what info you're after.

via google, i tend to find throwing either 'database' or 'API' after my specific term throws out best results. eg books api, cities database, books database, tv guide api, etc. "Books API" churns out plenty about Amazon, which is one source to consider. Also try stuff like: ISBN API, ISBN database, etc

i'm not really sure where your worries are, here - i cant see anything too intensive unless i'm missing something. read up about Models in Cake's documentation as you'd be able to read the user details (and hence the city details) automatically just by reading in the articles using the hasMany, belongsTo, etc. However, in your articles table, I'd suggest you store the city_id as well as the user_id. If a user moves house and updates their details, then this way the article will still be attached to the user but still relevent to the city it was initially written from. So nothing really about the view, but just thought i'd point out all that anyway Cheers

well - the rules are there, they're proven to help, they impose good "awareness" skills on you when designing a site, so they're good enough for me - regardless of whether the powers that be are hypocritical about it. these days, simple things like access keys help ME out, as well as their intended audience. i'm more a fan of keyboard shortcuts etc than mouseclicks, so any obvious signs that i can use the keyboard to easily navigate around a site is good for me. in addition, it's not as if it's that hard to get a site to validate or to make it accessible either - so as i've said before, there's really no excuse to not do it. if i was a client, then given the choice between a two companies - one that's keen on standards and accessibility and one that isnt, that could be the swinging factor. the web is still a relatively new technology, so doesnt yet have many strict laws to govern it. i like to think i'm trying to do my bit by making sure that every potential visitor can use my site. i'm not perfect by any means and still have a long way to go to get my old sites properly up to speed with 508, etc - but the fact that i'm aware of it is a good start, simple as that.

personal blog/rambling/photo sites are always a winner in this situation, as you can really go to town. I'm not talking about an installation of wordpress or gallery or forum software here - just code it yourself. doing a simple blog/news script is about as easy as it gets - then when youre more comfortable you can start adding other tools like comments, moderation, etc.

nope - not suggesting you learn Ruby at all (personally I dont have a clue how the whole Ruby syntax works). But it's more a "thinking outside the box" sort of scenario. As CakePHP is heavily based on Rails, the structure/principles behind the frameworks are pretty much the same, apart from the language it's written in (PHP vs Ruby). I'm saying that it's possible to learn something in Rails and easily be able to apply it to Cake - and as Rails' blog tutorial includes stuff like Comments for each blog entry (like a real blog), it'll give you more of an insight in terms of how models can be glued together to automatically sort out relationships that would otherwise be dealt with by plenty of SQL table joins. I looked at the Rails tutorial vids and tutorials mainly out of curiosity as to the bandwagon everyone seems to be hopping on, but as they're alot more in-depth and functional/useful than the Cake ones, it just kinda made sense to try and get them over to Cake - which was a piece of cake (!). If nothing else, it'll provide you with a decent idea of how frameworks work/can be used irrespective of the language they're written in, which is a bonus all round. Half the learning curve of a framework is understanding exactly what it can do for you.

There's not much Cake CAN'T do, to be fair. The MVC (Model/View/Controller) pattern is ideally suited to the web, which is all really Cake is - an MVC framework. It imposes a structure, gives you tools, and what you craft out of it is up to you. Frameworks in general dont restrict what you can do, they just kinda dictate how you do them - but for good reason, which you find out a few sites later when you realise you're actually using the same contact/forum/register/login, etc etc script as sites you've already done. My criteria for a good framework is not necessarily whether it fits my site requirements, as most (all?) do - but: 1, code is easy to install and use out of the box 2, easy to add various components/libraries, etc to as and when you need them. The hardest thing you'll find with Cake or CodeIgniter is the way the URL's are handled. If you're a big fan of $_GET, and URL's like: article.php?category_id=10&news_id=5 then forget most of these frameworks as they tend to take on a segment-like style - eg, /articles/10/5 or /articles/10/article5.htm or whatever, which can be a little confusing at first. once you get used to this approach however, you'll realise how much useless junk tends to get thrown across the URL just for convenience sake without taking into account issues with SEO. ahh well. you've probably got a fair bit to work with. Like I say, give CakePHP and the blog tutorial a go and you'll see what i mean. Once you're done, head over to the Ruby On Rails site and use CakePHP to follow THEIR blog tutorial too. The syntax is different but the principles are the same - CakePHP was heavily based on Rails - so most examples are fairly interchangable. Good luck!