PHP, MySQL & AJAX

Over a month!

2006-10-03T09:29:00.000Z

Damn! I've left it a while again to update the blog...

Well, i've managed to update the website with a few new bits and pieces. below is a run down..

1. As mentioned in the previous post, a Digg-like vote box.

2. A popup box for the coverart on the sleeve page. This uses the 'ibox' (http://www.ibegin.com/blog/p_ibox.html)

3. A popup box for a new comments system. this uses the 'ibox' too.

4. I've removed the thickbox for preference on the 'litebox' because its smaller footprint, speed and usability. (http://www.doknowevil.net/litebox/)

5. The 'register here' image on the bottom bar has been replaced for a clickable image that goes to the register page.

6. A new register page has been created but is not been implemented yet.

7. Page links have been added to the shelf page so you can jump to any page instantly. this also uses AJAX.

8. Concept image has been drawn of the register 'clipboard' page.

So! I haven't been lazy... (well, ok, a little bit.) but the site is coming along nicely... I'm concentrating on the registration part of the site at the moment. This is going to be quite complicated because I need to implement some method of being able to submit your tracks for approval... (give it a holding status... i.e. Submitted, Reviewing, Approved, Declined)

I also need to start thinking about the Avatar image upload scripts... i'll dive into my PHP book for help on this.

Sweet!

The Digg effect.

2006-08-29T12:35:00.000Z

Hallo!

I've successfully added a Digg-like vote box onto every product page. This little baby adds an entry into a new 'voting' table which keeps track of who has voted and who has not. it also uses AJAX, so its all done instantly. Each user can only vote for a product once and only once.

Cool!

see digg.com to see what i'm talking about.

Update.

2006-08-27T19:25:00.000Z

Blimey. Its been over a month already since my last update! I've done a few bits and bobs to the site, and its coming along nicely. Below is a quick list of things that I've being doing...

1. Built a webserver.

I decided to use an Ubuntu LAMP server for this in the end. The reason for this is because it is based on the debian system, which implements the amazing apt-get application. It is also easy to install and very secure from the beginning. I used the tutorial by the howtoforge.com website. check it out here: tutorial

2. Implemented PAYPAL.

I have been looking at both Paypal and the new Google checkout solutions for the payment scheme and decided to go with the paypal route since google only allows US payments only! cop out! The integration is proved quite difficult because i'm doing digital downloads which need to remain secure.

Thats it really, but these were two big stages of the website that needed doing...

I have to look at the security side of the paypal part a little bit more, but it seems to be working fine. I'm going to concentrate on the DIGG-like voting system for each track next. I also have to implement a tracking system for the paypal purchases.

Pure CSS Rounded-edge boxes, drop shadows and post-it notes.

2006-07-19T14:40:00.000Z

Afternoon.
Today i've been sitting at work bored as hell in the sweaty covent garden heat and thought i'd start playing around with some CSS to keep myself occupied. A couple hours later and I've created three funky CSS stylesheets to share with my fellow Internet designers and developers. The three stylesheets i've created are the following:

1. Pure CSS Round-cornered box.
I thought i'd have a crack at making a CSS-only round cornered box. The concept is quite simple actually... I use four bullet-point characters ampersand+hash+183 (·)
(& # 183)
to create the corners, and overlap a couple boxes to fill in the middle. Simple! it's not very scalable and uses absolute-positioning, but maybe somone could make a better version... anyway, here we go...

The HTML File "test.html":

<html>
<head>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<div id="rounded">
<div id="cornertl">·</div>
<div id="cornertr">·</div>
<div id="cornerbl">·</div>
<div id="cornerbr">·</div>
<div id="middle"><div id="text">test</div></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Next up is the actual CSS File "style.css":

#cornertl{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
color: #DDDDDD;
position: absolute;
left: 0em;
top: -0.5em;
}

#cornertr{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
color: #DDDDDD;
position: absolute;
left: 0.89em;
top: -0.5em;
}

#cornerbl{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
color: #DDDDDD;
position: absolute;
left: 0em;
top: 0.5em;
}

#cornerbr{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
color: #DDDDDD;
position: absolute;
left: 0.89em;
top: 0.5em;
}

#rounded{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
background-color: #DDDDDD;
width: 1em;
height: 1em;
}

#middle{
font-family: times;
font-size: 110px;
background-color: #DDDDDD;
width: 0.89em ;
height: 1.11em;
position: absolute;
left: 0.13em;
top: 0.03em;
}

#text{
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 10px;
}

Thats it! you should now have a grey box in the top-left corner of the screen when you open the HTML file.

2. Pure CSS Drop-Shadow.
I wanted to create a Digg-style digg box that has the rating of a story in it... I also wanted to create a simple drop-shadow effect that was scalable. (So when the text size is increased/decreased it still looks correct. Anyway, I managed to do it and you can see the code here (I know it uses a table, but I couldn't get it to scale properly any other way!):

The HTML File:

<html>
<head>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<table class="box">
<tr><td>
<div class="shadow4">
<div class="shadow3">
<div class="shadow2">
<div class="shadow1">
<div class="rating">9999</div>
<span class="websiterating">vote!</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

The CSS File:

.box{
width: 4em;
height: 20px;
}

.shadow1{
border: 1px solid #555555;
background-color: #DDFFBB;
width: 3em;
height: 3em;
}

.shadow2{
border-right: 1px solid #666666;
border-bottom: 1px solid #666666;
background-color: #666666;
width: 3.05em;
height: 3.05em;
}

.shadow3{
border-right: 1px solid #999999;
border-bottom: 1px solid #999999;
background-color: #999999;
width: 3.1em;
height: 3.1em;
}

.shadow4{
border-right: 1px solid #BBBBBB;
border-bottom: 1px solid #BBBBBB;
background-color: #BBBBBB;
width: 3.15em;
height: 3.16em;
}

.rating{
background-color: #99CC66;
border: 0px;
padding: 0.28em;
padding-top: 0.5em;
padding-bottom: 0.5em;
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
text-align: center;
color: #444444;
float: center;
}

.websiterating{
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
text-align: center;
color: #666666;
float: right;
padding-right: 2px;
}

You shold have a green 'Vote' Box with a nice CSS drop-shadow that grows and reduces with the Text size! cool...

And Finally:

3. A simple Post-it note... (This was my first one, so it sucks a little)

TTHE HTML FILE:

<html>
<head>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="Postit"><span>This is a postit note 1!</span></div>
</body>
</html>

THE CSS FILE 'style.css':

.Postit{
width: 30%;

background-color: #FFFFB3;
border-right: 3px solid #BBBBBB;
border-bottom: 3px solid #BBBBBB;
border-left: 1px solid #DDDDDD;
border-top: 1px solid #DDDDDD;
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
color: #666666;
padding: 5px;
margin: 5px;
float: left;
}

Simple!
Anyway, I hope that someone might find these useful... I'm going to use them on my website project, but its not copy-righted code so take it, rewrite it, do what you wish with it, I don't really mind!

Have fun!

Tooltips and PlayPoints.

2006-07-12T08:29:00.000Z

Last night I managed to sort out most of the 'Play Points' system that allows a customer to collect these points everytime they make a purchase. Once enough points have been collected they can use them to purchase more tracks!
The Sleeve page has a cool yellow price-tag star on it that shows how many points you earn when you purchase each track. (unitprice * 100).

The other little job I completed was to incorporate a tooltip when you hover over the country-code. the Tooltip will then bring up the name of that country! A little detail that helps the experience of bplayd.com!

I need to start thinking of a metaphor for the download page... maybe a computer screen or an album tracklisting-type thing... or a stack of CD's maybe... i'll have to have a think.

Today.

2006-07-11T15:29:00.000Z

I've been severly lacking with the website lately... I think its lack of motivation, but I've promised myself to start back into development of it again. I've decided to change the name from Whirled Sounds to bplayd.com (Be Played) Which is suggesting the customer to get their tracks played! It's very "Web 2.0"-like too. I'm not trying to jump on a bandwagon, but you have to recognise the power of trends.
I also think it would be interesting to incorporate a non-commercial creative commons license option for everyone who puts their track onto the website. I'm also planning to get the following people involved in the opening of the site...
DJ 2Tall,
Eclectic Breaks,
LowDeep and Colourful State,
Ian Fahy who's a talented Indie/R&B Singer,
1 or 2 other contacts and friends that are artists / producers.

The other issue is the usage of a 3rd party payment company... I've obviously got the option to use Paypal, but the new Google solution 'GBuy' has been released and is cheaper to use. Maybe its time to try a better company than ebay. (I've heard so many problems regarding paypal) hopefully if I start with GBuy from the beginning then it'll be a lot better.

I've got to work on the payment system next, and its probably the most difficult stage of the development. I'm hoping that once the payment system is done I can start work on doing-up the other pages of the site... I really want to incorporate a Digg-esque counter for every track available on the site to gauge the popularity of everything.

New Lightbox... LiteBox!

2006-07-05T08:45:00.000Z

http://www.doknowevil.net/litebox/

Upgrade to Lightbox. The iBox!

2006-06-22T08:31:00.000Z

Check this little baby out... a nice new replacement for the Lightbox Ajax functionality. (that i'm using for the magazine).

iBox

Nice tutorial of PHP user membership system

2006-06-22T08:17:00.000Z

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/40/0.php

My Top 5 XP Add-ons.

2006-06-21T11:22:00.000Z

I thought I'd share my top five XP addon's that are quite useful and fun. Microsoft Vista is just around the corner for most of us, so its time to see if you've really exploited the potential of XP yet...

1. Y'Z Dock.
This is a blatant copy of the infamous Apple icon dock that shrinks and grows your icons as you run the mouse over it. Use PNG icons instead of default ones to make sure that they scale properly and look lovely and shiny when enlarged. I do believe it has been discontinued now, but there are one or two other very similar programs that do the same job (see Mobydock & RK Launcher).
http://www.dockex.com/

2. Microsoft Virtual desktop manager.
One of the best things with Linux and Unix is the ability to have multiple desktops all running different programs in each. Unfortunately XP doesn't have this ability as standard (and even worse, Vista doesn't look like it has it either!). But with this official Microsoft powertool, you too can have multiple desktops! (it even has nice animation!)
Desktop Manager

3. Topdesk.
Have you seen the great 3D Task Alt-tab graphics on Vista? Thought it was only available for Vista? think again... TopDesk is actually very fast, very functional and looks like it could be a bit better that the Vista one!
You can download this as a 30-day trial, otherwise you have to pay for it. check it out at:
http://www.otakusoftware.com/

4. Yahoo Widgets. (formerly Konfabulator)
Lots of fun with many weird and wonderful little Widgets that do various tasks on your desktop. Everything from RSS readers, Post-it notes and To-do lists to Virtual light-sabres, 'LOST'-esque countdown timers and Dilbert comics! Vista has exactly the same concept except that they're called 'Gadgets' I believe...
widgets.yahoo.com/

5. Cygwin.
This is for the Linux lovers out there... Its an emulator for windows to allow you to run/compile linux software. It gives you a shell based on your windows directory structure and comes with a whole host of programs that you would find in a normal Linux distro. Regular Expressions, 'Grep' and 'Vi' heaven!
http://www.cygwin.com/

That's it... just a quick overview of software to make life on the desktop a little bit more fun and interesting. I know most of you will probably have heard of these, but then again, maybe you haven't. Have fun tweaking!

PHP Security issues.

2006-06-14T15:55:00.000Z

A nice little article about common PHP Security isses:

Article

Legal issues.

2006-05-24T09:10:00.000Z

What a day! Yesterday I met up with my new accountant to discuss the official setting-up of my company (This is primarily to do with my Contracting work, but will also work for this project too).
Lots of benefits, including a lot lower tax 20%! VAT Off equipment, and claiming expenses for travel, etc... Very cool stuff!
This is a big moment for me really, because its the moment I realise one of my personal ambitions. Gai has also agreed to be my company secretary, So it'll be big Cigar time I think!

As I go through the stages of setting up the company, i'll let you know what forms I fill in and complete.

The other thing on my mind at the moment is the whole DRM issue... I think I may have shot myself in the foot because I wasn't completely aware of the issues surrounding it. It seems that even though you're paying for a licence and a percentage for each track, you also have to ensure that Piracy doesn't happen by implementing DRM. I'm totally against this, so i'm going to try a figure a way around it. Unfortunately Apple use their 'FairPlay' DRM system on the iPod and have not opened it up for developers... therefore creating a monopoly on it. This sucks! Therefore, If I don't implement DRM I can only use independent record-label tracks and none of the major-label stuff (the huge majority). If I DO use DRM, It won't work on iPods. I hate this legal red-tape bollocks! Fucking wankers. the lot of them!
(DRM is the method of enforcing that user to not be able to copy tracks and use on lots of computers)

I've really got to have a think about this because i'm unsure about the licencing and legal issues surrounding it all. I really need to speak to someone in the know...
Does an PRS-MCPS Licence mean I don't need DRM? or do I still need to use DRM? When can I NOT use DRM? In an Ideal world I'd like to sell AAC,WMA,MP3 format tracks that are not DRM'd from the Major labels... this is not much to ask is it?

The artwork.

2006-05-23T11:30:00.000Z

Just an quick addition... heres an image of the artwork that Gai has drawn. (and my initial colouring). :-)

Character Design, Updates and LAMP.

2006-05-23T11:26:00.000Z

Lots of fun! I've hooked my best friend Gai (Fairy!) into doing some amazing character artwork for me. She's finished the first drawing of a sexy asian girl which i'm in the process of colouring in. I'm using these characters as both the store assistants and default avatars to select as your profile image. I think to begin with we're sticking with music stereotypes to add some fun to the site.

On a nerdy note, I've been looking at the possibilities of the LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and i'm deciding on whether to use a Debian install (which will be lightweight and quite configurable), an Ubuntu Install (which is a debian distribution but with a KDE Desktop) or SuSE 10.1 (which is the new stable release and has been highly recommended). Oh, or Unix SUN Solaris. I think i'll go with the Debian install and create an Install disk that will automatically add everything I need straight off the bat..

Errmmm, what else... Oh, the http://www.onlamp.com website (part of the o'reilly network) is quite useful I've found, and there is a very interesting article about using Debian 'Sarge' as a LAMP server, found here: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/357

OH!, I haven't mentioned the updates i've done...
1) There is a new 'Passport' page that displays each customers Bio information and avatar image.
2) When a customer logs in, their avatar image appears on the GITS section next to the shopping crate and also overlays the number of award points using a bit of nifty CSS.
3) The product pages are looking better... They have the review, coverart, countrycode, record label, and product code added to the page. I need to change the "add to crate" icon though...
4) The magazine is about 60% done now... I've just finished the Buying-guide section and have about 11 pages left to do.

Thats about it folks!

Again, a big thanks to Gai for her help with the Art! (I'll probably try to rope her into other bits too... :-)

PHP5 Speeds.

2006-05-22T08:42:00.000Z

Good morning. A good link on Digg today about the speeds of PHP Benchmarks. check it out... http://byster.net/?page_id=48

Good for optimising code.

DB Spring clean and a cool article!

2006-05-15T16:02:00.000Z

I've been playing around with test data today... I've loaded into the database about 2000 Products to make this prototype a little bit more real-worldy. I've also tweaked the database and removed some old tables and columns. (basically a bit of a spring-clean.)
I've also added some 20-character limits on the output of the columns on the shelf page to make sure it doesn't push the page down if it goes off the end of the line.

Finally, i've found a great article on load-balanced Apache clusters! check it out!
THE ARTICLE

Monday morning.

2006-05-15T08:53:00.000Z

To have a truely 'up-to-date' website you've gotta have a lot of plug-ins don't you! I started off with just running Apache, PHP and MySQL... But now, i've had to include Javascript, AJAX, XML and CSS just to keep up with the big guys in the web business. With all these different technologies running together it going to be a nightmare performance tuning everything!
For a quick breakdown:
The Javascript & AJAX is used for a lot of the product-results based pages. (Shelf, Bargain Crate, Search, etc) and also the record crate too.
The XML is used to support multiple languages. I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible, but I need to be able to translate the site into many languages by supplying a new XML file.
The CSS is used primarliy for font and colouring aspects of the site. (Please see last weeks rant about CSS). After reflecting of the whole CSS thing, I've still got to create a text-based version of the site, so the whole CSS positioning thing might come in handy. (Yeah, I know... but this is my blog and I can change my mind if I damn-well like!) :-)
The other thing i've been looking into is the variable-quality JPEG format. In photoshop you can specify the quality of a JPEG image to be 1 to 100, BUT, you can also set it to be a range... for instance 45 to 55 which will make the image quality variable and will reduce the file size greatly!
I think I also need to reduce the colour palette of all the images, because this obviously will reduce the filesize too.

Rants, CSS and The shelf.

2006-05-12T15:03:00.000Z

I'm gonna go on a rant today... The whole fuss about CSS-Positioning and not using table-based design. I understand the advantages of using CSS to lay out your web pages, and I realise that it's easy to make your pages accessable to all browsers, but the bottom line is that CSS-Positioning is a pain in the arse! I've just completed a mock-up of my menu-bar for the site in CSS and using DIV and SPAN tags. I'm sorry, but the whole concept is ugly... A separate CSS file which takes ages to read and work out what its doing to certain elements in the html file is just time-consuming and cumbersome. You have to take keep account on what the other elements are doing and its a complete nightmare if you leave the file for a week, come back to it, and try and work out what the hell you did! It's bollocks.
I'm gonna stick to my table-based positioning, thank-you very much! I'm going with the time-old adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if anyone says that tables can cause problems in other browsers, well, you should taken that into account and be a better designer, shouldn't you!
Don't get me wrong, i'm still using CSS, and maybe i'll have another crack at it at a later date, but for now, i'm unimpressed with all the supposed 'cutting-edge' minimalistic websites that are dry, boring, have a lack of any design imagination and are just two-a-penny. Everyones site looks the same! (Flickr, Google, Ajaxian, Digg, Script.aculo.us, etc...)

Well I so NO! NO to shitty designs. NO to telling me that CSS is the best thing since sliced bread. NO to people actually putting no effort into anything these days and trying to make out that its the bomb. F**K OFF the lot of you.

Design is about being creative... putting *REAL* Effort into something that is head-and-shoulders above the rest. No blagging needed. No screaming about how good it is. It speaks for itself.
Actually, it doesn't even have to be good! As long as some imagination has gone into it... as long as you've poured your heart and soul into it... THAT is design. NOT being able to create a 'reflective' glass-like menu button in photoshop.

You know what, i'm not even any good at design. But I put my 110% into whatever it is that I do... and I'm pretty sure it shows. There's too many people who know about a bit of photoshop and can't draw with a pencil to save their lives! Whats wrong here!

Anyway... enough of that. bollocks to it.

Onwards and upwards I say!

Right, anyway, I've managed to put some extra buttons on the shelf page that will allow the user to sort the results into the following orders:

Price (Cheapest first)
Price (Expensive first)
Date (Newest first)
Date (Oldest first)
Alphabetically (A to Z)
Alphabetically (Z to A)

And the best bit is that it's in AJAX, so the results reorder themselves on-the-fly and without re-loading the page! whoo hoo!

I'm now about 50% through the FLOW magazine and have finished the designing of 25pages... its taking quite a bit of time to make sure everything is laid out correctly, but i'm sure its worth it! Plus I've noticed that the text styles are becoming slightly inconsistent so i'll have to go back and change them so that the remain in-tune with all articles.

I've also been able to complete the sleeve page and allow the item description and coverart to be displayed. I've removed the Quantity and Weight amounts since I'm dealing with MP3's!

Thats it! Phew... thats a big update, I know. but I've been neglecting the blog for a week or so.

Colours...

2006-05-10T10:43:00.000Z

I've been putting lots of comments into the main function include file today. Its a lot more readable now, and has been separated up into sections. I was also reading about security issues in .NET magazine yesterday... It suggests that if you connect to a MySQL database from PHP then you should place all of you credentials into a separate file below the web root directory and the do an include-once call. This makes it much more difficult for hackers to obtain the database credentials. Sounds like good advice!

The other thing i've been looking at is optimizing the graphics for the site... Unfortunately, they're really big files (in web terms) ranging from about 60k to about 220k. Which is a bit too big. I'm thinking that I must be able to optimise the image to reduce these JPG files down... we'll see what happens.

Cheat Sheets.

2006-05-09T09:19:00.000Z

Good morning readers. Time for an update I think... I've been organising the CSS stylesheets to be a little more intuitive and while I was doing that I came across this VERY helpful website that has some interesting cheatsheets for CSS, MySQL & PHP (among others...) http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/

I've also managed to add the review and image part to the sleeve pages. The Barcode, country postal mark, record label print and label all work too now!

The next thing to tackle is the ordering of the shelf pages...

Optimisations

2006-05-05T08:45:00.000Z

Has it been a week! blimey... Well, I haven't been doing much actually. I've been playing on my new MDA Vario phone and playing FarCry Instincts. Anyway, I read this article today from Digg... http://www.dublish.com/articles/10.html Very good!

Update today.

2006-05-02T14:22:00.000Z

Afternoon people! Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend. I completed some work on the site... namely I drew the sleeve.php graphics and also did some more of the magazine. A few icons were completed and thats about it! The work i'm doing is kinda trailing off and I need to get some renewed energy I think!

Flow

2006-04-27T13:48:00.000Z

It's quite remarkable how little amount of information is available for magazine designing on the internet... I've been trying to design the pages of the Flow magazine and can't really find anything to help me. Therefore, i'm in the frame of mind of stuff-it, i'll make the magazine how I want to! Since most 'experts' on subjects are usually full of shit anyway, I think i'll just go with my instincts and create a magazine that is something that I'D want to read... (and just prey its something that others would like!) he he.

I've completed a rough layout of all the pages of the magazine and have decided that it'll be a 50-Page affair front-to-back that will be released on a monthly basis. 10 of the pages will be adverts and i'm hoping some big-fish companies will throw cash at me to put product adverts in the mag! whoo hoo! loadsa money! I wish...

Last nights inspiration.

2006-04-26T09:08:00.000Z

Had a bit of an Inspirational talk with a friend last night about the whole website and I was really hyped about everything, so I managed to get quite a lot done...
I've been using the massively popular and well written Lightbox Javascript library for the magazines Flow and Hearwax, but there seems to have been an upgrade in the form of the ThickBox! ( http://codylindley.com/)
Thickbox is a much smaller (in file size) implementation of lightbox and adds the support of many other file formats... For example, you can load HTM,HTML,GIF,JPEG,PNG,Etc... Very handy!

I've also been looking at possible content for the Flow magazine... (The Music News, Reviews and Interviews e-mag). I've primarily come up with the following:

- Contents / Credits / Copyrights
- News
- Primary Article
- Secondary Article
- Headline Interview
- New-Blood Artist Profiles
- Track Previews
- Album Previews
- DJ / Producer / MC /Singer Workshops.
- Gadgets and Gear
- General Knowledge and Stats.
- Websites of note.
- Buying guide
- The Old School. A look back on an Album / Artist / Year, etc...
- Book Reviews
- Movie Reviews
- Game Reviews
- Art Review. (Artist profile)
- Q & A
- The Diary
- Damn the man! A monthly rant about the system.
- A Woman's perspective. Article about anything.
- Next Months issue
- Back Issue covers
- Advertiser Index

After my chat with my friend I've been running things through my head and need to do a little changing of the site... First off, If I'm only concentrating on downloads then I obviously don't need delivery companies. If I don't need delivery companies then I don't need to know the weight of the product... this can be changed to file sizes I suppose. At least this is a whole step I can bypass and shorten the transaction cycle.
I've also decided that I'm going to provide both WMA and AAC formats since they both have open licences and I don't have to pay a penny! Talking of which... I was thinking about the whole VAT issues and implications of downloads.
Anyway, I've brought my drawing book into work today to have a sketch of the sleeve.php screen (The track detail screen) and start on that.
I want to incorporate as many of my friends into the flow magazine and make it a joint venture... Thereby any revenue (from advertising) will be split between all contributors accordingly. I think that all contributors should also submit one review for the HearWax magazine too.
Hearwax will be a LOT simpler to create because its a shorter magazine that will include the following pages:

- Contents / Credits / Copyrights
- Singles Reviews
- Album Reviews
- Next months issue
- Back issue covers
- Advertiser Index

That's it! not a lot to it really... I don't want it complicated because its really just a storage area for reviews of tracks and albums. A one-stop shop for a summary of musical productions.

File formats and Licensing.

2006-04-24T14:28:00.000Z

Afternoon everyone.

I've been reading into Audio formats to use on the site for downloads... It seems that both AAC and WMA are free to distribute! This is great news because I can provide both formats for iPod/iTunes users and Windows users too! I could also provide OGG Vorbis format but the problem is that I have to initially think about how much storage space all the files will take up! Adding another file format will mean I'll drastically have to increase that amount of space I have to buy...
MP3 native format has licensing fees, so forget that! I'm also thinking about the potential tax issues I'll have to face... Being the Internet, I'm sure there are some grey areas I can take advantage of! he he...

After having a chat with my friend over the weekend I think I should concentrate on music downloads first... then maybe associate myself alongside a vinyl/CD supplier at a later date. This makes sense because the logistics would be a nightmare!

Rough proposed web statistics.

2006-04-20T15:22:00.000Z

Just been having a brain-storm on possible statistics I should use on my site and what I'd be interested in knowing... I'm going to write my own stats page instead of using a 3rd party one because its for future knowledge and customisability... below is my quick analysis.

Statistics
==========

Users
-----
- How many website hits for each page (Daily bar graph)
- How many Registered users (Daily bar graph)
- What countries the users are coming from (Pie Chart)
- What ISP the user is coming from (Pie Chart)
- Average time on each page (Timing in seconds)
- Visitor paths through the site
- Which Browser is the user using? (pie chart)
- Which OS is the user using? (pie chart)
- Screen Resolution sizes (Bar Graph)
- Javascript Enabled / Disabled (Bar graph)
- What is the most active time of day? (Bar chart)

Transactions
------------
- What is the spending amount? (Bar graph)
- Who are the top 100 award point earners? (Bar graph)
- What users are spending the most?
- How many products are being bought in one transaction? (bar graph)
- How much is MCPS-PRS getting? (on 8%)
- How much profit am I making? (on 92%)
- What payment methods are users using? (Pie chart)

Products
--------
This is for MP3 / Vinyl / CD / ALL
- What are the most popular products? How many are being sold? (bar graph)
- What is the popularity of each genre? (bar graph)
- How many products are available? (bar graph)
- What products are at zero qty? (list)

Delivery
--------
- What is the most popular delivery method?

Clients
-------
- How many hits are each client getting? (Bar graph)

Alarms
------
- Are any users spending over £150 on a transaction? (bar chart)
- Which users have earned over 50 points in the last day?

Traffic
-------
- What is the bandwidth usage? (Line graph)
- What is the projected bandwidth usage? (Line graph)
- How full is the databases? (Line graph)
- What is the load on each web server? (Bar graph)
- How many MySQL connections to the DB are there? (Line graph)

I'm sure there's lots more stats i'll be interested in later on, but this is a rough brain-storm, so it's not set in concrete!

Operating Systems and Networks...

2006-04-19T10:04:00.000Z

Today I've been having a chat to the networks guy at John Lewis Direct (my current contract) regarding a suitable network configuration for a web server setup. We came to the conclusion that it would look a little like this:

This would be the ideal setup especially if I make the four web servers into a linux beowulf cluster supercomputer. I'm yet to figure out the best operating system to use, but i'm edging towards either Fedora Core 5, Debian, FreeBSD or the new Ubuntu linux ditribution. Obviously this would run the webserver Apache and have PHP 5 & MySQL running on it.

Sllllooooowwww...

2006-04-18T15:47:00.000Z

What a crap day. Very slow and boring. I've jotted down some notes about The payment system and the register system. The payment process will consist of the following screens.
1. ShopFloor.
2. Shelf. (Genres)
3. Sleeve. (Product)
4. Counter. (The Bill summary)
5. Delivery & Address. (Method and location)
6. Payment. (Order Summary + Card details)
7. Download. (Any downloadables accessable here.)
8. Receipt. (Summary of purchases)

The Register page will be:
1. Shopfloor / GIMP system.
2. Register page.
3. Send confirmation email.
4. Confirm page.
5. Login page.
6. Customer details.

That sounds about right I think... I've got most of the graphics sorted in my head too...

Back to work blues...

2006-04-18T08:52:00.000Z

Happy (belated) Easter! Well, the long weekend has finally come to an end and everyone's back to work. Can't believe it went so quickly! I was hoping to get a lot done on the site over the holiday, but unfortunately I didn't get as much done as I hoped... Here's a little run down:
- Finally completed the colouring of the Shop Floor graphics.
- Re-drew the shelves page, scanned it in and bunged it into Photoshop.
- Started colouring the new Shelves page.
- Added a little bit of new code into the shop-floor PHP page which will determine the current time and load either a 'daytime' or 'nighttime' image! kinda adds that little bit of fun...

I also bought the new books 'Head Rush Ajax' and 'Ajax Hacks' from O'Reilly... I've started on the head-rush Ajax and will let you know what I think. I must admit that the way the book is configured is a little insulting to I.T. professionals... all the stupid photos of people and stuff feels like I'm back a junior school! I'll trudge on with it though...

I also wanted to give a small heads-up to my friend Sarnders who is embarking on his first little HTML project... www.colourfulstate.com

Todays tidbit

2006-04-13T13:33:00.000Z

Had a play around with some XML today. Its quite easy to write but I'm not sure how to import all of the content into PHP. I'm thinking of a recursive function which reads in the XML file and tags and creates variables contain the contents of each tag. I can then call each variable in the PHP file and apply CCS styles to each variablename!
I pretty sure I need SAX for this... A PHP XML Parser.

I have a long easter weekend to get the graphics completed for the three main pages too! whoo hoo! what a sad life I lead...

Performance and Scalability.

2006-04-12T10:28:00.000Z

Following on from my last post, there was an article on Digg.com that spoke to the websites' senior software engineer on the topics of performance and scalability... a good read! check it out...
Performance and Scalability

OO, Languages and Web Servers

2006-04-12T10:01:00.000Z

Fixed a tiny problem with the checkout lastnight. It displayed an error message if the user had not logged in... I just put a simple IF statement in to check if there was a checkout session object created. If not, then don't run the code.

I'm playing with the idea of changing my code to Object-Orientated style but have conflicting feelings about it to be honest. I have minimal experience with OO coding and can't see any real great advantage to using this style of coding... The thing is, everyone goes on about it because its so much greater, so there must be reasons for this attitude. More research needed I think.

Other issues I need to look at is multi-language support. As a guess, I'm thinking that it would be best to implement an interface where I can upload some sort of XML file for each language... this will then automatically update the site with support for that dialect. The idea is that the XML file will contain all Text for the whole site and can therefore be updated quickly and simply.
As a high level idea of each site i'm thinking that it will look like the following:

+page.php   -   (Handles the main formating of page)
++ stylesheet.css   -   (For general style formating)
++ language.xml   -   (For text content of page in specific language)
++ GIN.php   -   (Graphical Interface Navigation)
++ GITS.php   -   (Graphical Interface Trolley System)
++ GIIL.php   -   (Graphical Interface Information Line)
++ Functions.php   -   (Included PHP Functions)
++ Javascript.js   -   (Any Javascript Needed for page)

The next Major jobs to tackle are the customer order system. Once all the graphics are completed for the three main parts of the process (Shelf/Sleeve/Till), I need to think about the recording of shipping details/delivery methods/contact details/credit details/etc... man, thats gonna be a job... not looking forward to that.

I've started to look at server hardware too... I'm going to host my own site because I want the control of doing it myself. If this becomes too expensive or the logistics are just ludacris then i'll go with a hosting company. But i'll start off with 5 machines: 3 Web servers, 1 Load balancer and 1 firewall. Maybe I can combine the load balancer and firewall into one machine. This machine doesn't have to be a particularly top-of-the-range one either because it's processes will be passive...

Todays update. HearWax and Flow Issues.

2006-04-11T13:55:00.000Z

Well, Today is a bit slow... I did a little graphics and design work last night to update the counter/bill details to a print-out type page. I've also been playing with the magazine layout, but have a few different ideas I have to play with. i.e.

1. 2 or 3 Columns? I'm thinking that Three columns would allow a lot more content on each page, but two columns would look a little less newspaper-esque... I want to have a real nice GQ / Vogue / Vibe Magazine type feel to it.

2. What font? I definately think a Sans-Serif font like Arial or Verdana to keep it clean. Try an do the whole Web 2.0 BIG & BOLD font thing...

3. Magazine Size. I could replicate a real magazine page size but this actually has wasted space on the sides. I can actually add another 70 pixels onto each page (which gives enough space for the 3 columns).

4. Stories. What things am I gonna cover? I've got the two magazines... Flow, which deals with all the News, Gossip, Interviews, Articles/Stories, Movies, Fashion, etc.
The other magazine, HearWax will concentrate on Reviews and Previews of Albums and Singles only.

5. Magazine Length. How many pages per issue? To begin with i'm thinking about only 20 pages per magazine... keep it short and sweet.

6. Magazine frequency. I guess it'll start monthly, then bi-weekly, then weekly depending on staff and time!

7. Images. I'll get most images from the Net I think.

8. Branding. I'm gonna have to make some LOGOs and do some branding for each mag...

Thats the list of stuff to do at the moment.

MySQL Stored Procedures.

2006-04-10T14:34:00.000Z

MySQL has the ability to run stored procedures on v5.0 and above... It looks like I might implement stored procedures on the main website to improve speed and efficiency. If you're interested, check out this article on the subject here: MySQL Stored Procedures

I don't think i'll bother with stored procedures on the admin pages because they're won't be much need for speeding stuff up if only 1 or 2 people will be using it... I might do it as an exercise or for a future upgrade.

PNG Support

2006-04-10T11:18:00.000Z

I was looking into the PNG support of Photoshop CS and it seems quite crappy… There’s no PNG-32 format available and after being told that PNG files have better compression than GIF, I’m still keeping the main page images to JPEGs. The PNG format still puts banding on my images and degrades the colour. Only problem is that the file sizes are huge! Approx 150k to 220k each! That’s just not good for low-bandwidth users. If I can’t figure out a better way, I’ll just have to re-direct those users to the low-bandwidth version of the site. (CSS and no images!)

MCPS-PRS Details

2006-04-10T11:01:00.000Z

Last week I spoke to someone at the MCPS-PRS alliance regarding the legalities and licensing of MP3’s on a website… They sent me some documentation and forms, but the crux of it was this:

You apply for a licence which a board will decide to accept or deny. They also negotiate a yearly fee.
You pay the yearly fee and you also get charged 12% (discounted to 8%) per MP3 you sell (Which is from an artist registered on MCPS-PRS). The amount you owe for each download is offset against this yearly fee.
Once you have the licence you can pretty much sell ANY track or tune you wish from around the world.
MCPS-PRS do not care where you get the source music, as long as its not illegal. (Peer2Peering) But don’t check anyway. Therefore, any CD’s/Records you own, etc… can be used.
That’s it!

Sounds quite reasonable to me, but you still need to sell quite a lot before you make decent money… I created a simple spreadsheet to work out the rough prices of things… see below:

If the MP3 costs 79p each, then if you sell:

10units - £7.90 price - £0.80 prs - £7.10 profit.

50units - £39.50 price - £6.00 prs - £35.50 profit.

100units - £79.00 price - £12.00prs - £71 profit

1000units - £790.00 price - £1,200prs - £7,100 profit

10,000units - £7900.00 price - £12,000prs - £64,000.00 profit.

The profit is minus the money owed to PRS. These are very rough guesses obviously, but gets some perspective on things I guess.

Art and Graphics

2006-04-10T10:45:00.000Z

I really need to seriously concentrate on the art and graphics of the site because I’ve neglected to do anything for a while… I’ve been concentrating on the Admin page coding. I really want to get the Front page finished before I do any other Artwork but I need to start on the Shelf page and Sleeve page. I have to keep to the core functionality before I think about any other parts. There’s tons to do, but I enjoy doing it!

//Listening to: David Axelrod – An Axelrod Anthology.

2006-04-10T08:09:00.000Z

I realised that I'd not posted any images of the actual website yet, so here's some mini screenshots of both the main site and admin frontend.

Actually... I've removed the image of the main site. Call me paranoid but I don't want anyone getting ideas of copying it. I'd be very unhappy if a rip-off turned up before I'd launched the site. sorry.

2006-04-10T07:56:00.000Z

Well, at least its sunny this monday morning! Thought i'd come into work early and post some screenshots of the new magazine functionality for 'Flow' and 'HearWax'. These use the wonderful Lightbox V2.0 Javascript library. Had great fun playing around with it...
Ok, The first image is a screenshot of the 'Flow' magazine cover.

As you can see, it darkens out the background of the website and loads the image of the cover.

Next up is an image of the contents page of the 'Flow' magazine. I've added a flyer image from electic breaks on the opposite page to add to the whole magazine effect.

Lastly, this is the contents page of the 'HearWax' reviews magazine. I included an image of the new movie 'Inside Man' for effect...

Well, I'm hoping that once this is all done I can get some good designer / writers to take responsibility for the magazines and I can concentrate on taking over the world...

I hope you like!

AJAX Books

2006-04-09T16:10:00.000Z

Afternoon!

Thought i'd quickly link to some AJAX books that look quite interesting. I might try and pick up the O'Reilly AJAX Hacks books myself...

Anyway, take a looksee at the following:

AJAX Hacks
Head Rush AJAX

Professional AJAX

AJAX in Action

Foundations of AJAX

Possible Lightbox V2.0 magazine integration.

2006-04-07T14:11:00.000Z

After successfully figuring out the button problem, I need to alter all the other admin scripts to include the same buttons. I might change this to a generic function that will serve as a central place for the buttons code. (Therefore only needing to change the code only once if ever needed again). The entire list of If statements will need changing though.

On a separate note, I'm thinking of using the new 'lightbox v2.0' AJAX library for my Magazine pages… (There will be two magazines on the site, 'Flow' which reviews music, and 'Hearwax' which will deal with music articles, interviews and news.) I'm thinking that when a user clicks on the magazine cover the lightbox window pops up with the contents of the magazine. Which can sit on top of the main interface. The pages can be cached, and it allows for bigger sized pages too!. Cool.

See lightbox v2.0 in action: http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/

PHP Image buttons solved!

2006-04-07T13:31:00.000Z

Well, earlier in the day I mentioned I was trying to figure out a method for using images as buttons on a form. Now usually this is quite simple because it means just using the <input type="image"> tag, but the problem arose from the 'value' attribute. Basically, my PHP page had an IF statement at the top of the page that looked like this:

If ($_POST['button'] == 'next'){

Echo 'Do something';

}

With a form button at the bottom of the page that looked like this:

This system worked and I was happy with it. Now I want to change the grey buttons for my own images, but the problem that became apparent is that when you change to <input type="image" name="button" value="next" alt="next" src="image.gif"> the 'value' tag actually gets ignored!! This is a problem since the IF statement relies on the value tag to figure out which button was pressed.

After using the phpinfo() function, I found out an alternative variation of this method…

The input button is changed to this:

And you need to slightly tweak the IF statement to say:

If (isset($_REQUEST['next_x'])){

Echo "Do something";

}

An X and Y coordinate of the button image are passed to the POST process as values instead of the contents of the 'value' tag. These values are placed under [name value]_x and [name value]_y ( i.e. next_x & next_y). Therefore, I'm just making the IF statement test to see which [name value] has been set! (since only 1 button can be pressed at a time.)

That's it!

Well chuffed!

Free eBooks.

2006-04-07T09:27:00.003Z

I was playing around with googles’ ‘inurl:’ tag the other day to search for some free eBooks. Its surprising how powerful google can be when you know how to search properly… Well, I used the following search string: “inurl:chm O'reilly ebook” and kinda found the following links:

storage.vnunited.com/EBOOKS_upload/CHM/

and

http://lab.lpicn.org/pub/books/

Ermmm… well… what more can I say!

Some interesting links.

2006-04-07T09:27:00.002Z

One of my favourite sites is http://www.digg.com/ and it had a post in regards to a coders reference guide… check it out… http://www.gotapi.com/ very helpful!

The First post!

2006-04-07T09:27:00.001Z

Ok, well lets get started… my current problem is that I’m trying to cut down the administration site to have less PHP functions (because I went a bit overboard initially) and have generated around eight or nine generic functions that will do the job of the previous 20 or 30! I had written a separate add/delete/update function for every page that accesses a different MySQL table and now the generic function is flexible enough to specify what table/columns/wherecriteria etc… Anyway, the problem now is that I want to change the buttons I have to trigger these functions to images. The only issue is that the previous buttons had ‘value’ attributes in the input tags: ie. input type=”submit” name=”button” value=”next record”. Now, when I change to the input type=”image”, the ‘value’ attribute gets ignored! As a solution, I’ve been told to use the ‘id’ attribute instead… so I’ll let you know how it goes!

Introduction

2006-04-07T09:27:00.000Z

Good Morning!

Welcome to my new progress blog. Let me give you a little background on this little adventure I have in front of me… Basically, while I was travelling the world during 2005, I decided that once I had got back I wanted to to start a business for myself. This business would be an online music store that would sell MP3s, CD’s and Vinyl concentrating on the Urban genre niche. My background is that I’m an I.T. contractor and have enjoyed playing with various web projects and am quite a seasoned veteran on many programming languages. I want to create a completely professional solution with free technologies and keep everything down to a minimum… hence the use of PHP, MySQL and Apache.

Anyway, this blog will hopefully track my progress from now on (since I’m half way through the site already… it started in November 2005) and maybe help others with some of their coding issues.

See ya!