This is more of a in-the-heat-of-the-moment post, so I’ll keep it brief. I’m working on my graduate project, AreYouAG33k.com, and I’m attempting to display the FAQ as a structured, ordered, list. The only hiccup is that this list needs to be split between two divs (left and right side of page) and the numbering needs to continue from the left into the right. In the old days, we could just use the start property of the ol tag to reset our counter.  But now we have to rely on confusing and unnecessary css code.  So I began my quest by following this tutorial.

After about 30 minutes of hard-core tweaking, I ended up with the following page (which I was very satisfied with).

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I renewed two of my domain names today: Caffeine-Junkie.com and User-Manual.net.  I wasn’t sure if I should keep my old radio show’s domain, User-Manual.net, as it’s been defunct for over a year now.  A while back, my old host got hacked (not through any of my web apps, but the server itself) and the hackers changed the content of any file with index in the name to be their group slogan and a short message about them bragging.  Ugh.  My host didn’t back any files up, and their best remedy was to replace all “infected” files with the default Apache welcome message.  Luckily I had most of my domain names backed up somewhere, but since I did so much custom work on User-Manual, I couldn’t find any trace of a working backup.  Since then, the site has been “down for maintenance.”

I was really considering letting it go, but I just felt that maybe that domain name might come to good use one day instead of being turned into a useless sponsored listing portal.  Even though it’s been three years since I ran the User-Manual show on WHRT, I still remember the huge AIM virus outbreak and the only real content on my site was a simple tutorial on how to remove it.  Interestingly enough, I later added some flash games just for kicks and the huge success of these spawned my senior project SHUGamer.com.

On an additional side-note, SHUGamer.com is apparently no more.  The server was hosted at my project partner’s house and was accidentally disconnected when Cablevision came to fix an issue with the television.  Since then (a month ago) he has not turned it back on, dispite my requests.  I do have some people asking me if the site will return (as they played quite often), but it is unlikely from the looks of it.

RIP 2007-2009 SHUGamer.com

Continuing with yesterday’s useful PHP function, I present a function to convert a normal number to an ordinal number.  This is extremely simple and is great for ranking users or numbers dynamically. (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)

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I noticed that most of my posts and projects have been quite centered around C# and application development instead of PHP and web development. To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid of releasing my PHP code. Trust me, I write in true PHP 5 – very class oriented, none of this HTML intertwined between PHP code bull. It’s more that I want the code to be perfect before I release it. Starting now, I’ll try to share some useful functions I wrote that might help you on your quest to developing a PHP website.

Today, I’ll show you a quick function that converts time in words to seconds. Well, let’s say you are using memcached and you want to save an item for X seconds.  It may be simple to put 60 for a minute or 3600 for a hour, but larger than that gets complex and not so easy to reverse (129600 is a day and a half).  This function converts simple terms like “1d 6h” or “2h 24m 15s” to their seconds counterpart.

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Yes, yes.  I know I have not been updating.  I need to get a schedule down for posting projects and blog entries.  In the meantime, I have to vent about ASP.net.

Don’t get me wrong, ASP.net is very powerful and easy to write.  For beginners, it is very simple (drag and drop) but for power-users, it can be extremely frustrating.

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