Error406 – This is just not acceptable!

I’ve not been posting on here in a while now, and I do apologise for this! It’s embarrassing that Wordpress is updating quicker than I’m posting.. what I need is other writers! If you want to help me out writing about technology/gaming/internet etc. let me know!

Anyway, what have I been up to:

Most of my time has been taken up by an exciting project i’ve been working on at: http://www.MatlockTown.net

This site will be a social network for my local town of Matlock with all the greatest features of the big social sites such as a footerbar chat like facebook/myspace, image tagging and adding video streams from sites like YouTube! Contact details can be found on the site if you want to take part in Beta testing it!

Another site I’ve been working on is called M.A.S.T found at: http://www.mastrust.org

M.A.S.T stands for Matlock Area Schools Trust, they attend school assemblies and help run childrens clubs to promote the Christian faith. You can find out more about them by visiting the website. I designed (I know the design isnt great, but im not a designer..) and developed a simple CMS for them to manage/update their site.

Promotion and Advertising has been my biggest weakness but I’m improving and learning of new ways to do this. I have 2 facebook accounts (1 personal and 1 for website promotion), 2 Twitter accounts (both promotion), 2 YouTube accounts (both personal but thinking of another for promotion). Along with social advertising I have been reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques to help promote my clients websites.

OddJobs are what I have been doing on and off over the last 5 or so years on the internet. Helping coders out with snippets, creating mods for established scripts. The latest addition to this was for a CMS called BigAce which I helped translate from Bad English to hopefully Good English – Not really translating but it certainly felt like it with the number of mistakes I had to correct! Other than that I also make a small mod for the CMS called the Twitter Portlet which is basically just a widget that displays a Twitter feed but it only took about 5 minutes to make.. Link: http://www.bigace.de

Lastly is the social/personal activities, while I spend alot of time with my clients work, outside of this I tend to spend alot of time with my friend/family taking trips, playing football weekly, pool/snooker, gaming and eating out. We all need to have a social life!

Anyway, none of the above is an excuse for my post absence on here and I do wish to continue to add some technology news/reviews etc. as im sure your now sick of my personal ones ranting, complaining etc.

admin Personal been, bigace, cms, facebook, matlock, myspace, Personal, town, where

Apress Beginning PHP and MySQL Third Edition

I have alot of spare time on my hands since im currently unemployed (give me a job!! lol) so I spend it quite wisely improving my knowledge of web programming languages by both writing web scripts/code snippets for various well known scripts on the internet and reading various books I’ve bought and been given over the past few years.

My latest book that I’m reading is called Beginning PHP and MySQL by publisher Apress. This 1000 page book gives detailed examples of both PHP and MySQL, guiding you from the basics towards advanced topics such as database security and using SMARTY templating.

I am about 150 pages into this book and find it very interesting to read even though I already know quite abit from the code I’ve written (its nice to know what things are called!).

I would recommend anyone wanting to get into web development, especially into PHP to read this book as it covers the majority of the programming language, even if the 1000 pages put you off.

The only downside to this book is that its not one of those books that gets you to work through examples, instead its more of a reference book and can be hard to get into without a real desire and determination to get through it.

Overall I really like this book, with its detailed descriptions of every aspect of php and mysql but lacks working examples of other similar books so it can be hard to read. I’d give it 8/10

I will explain other books as I get through them, including books about ASP, ASP.NET, Javascript and Ajax.

What books are you currently reading? Or when was the last time you read a book?

admin Personal, Web Development book, mysql, php, reading, script, web