The Misadventures of Dan

Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

.:7:48:57 PM:.

So there was a bit of a delay...

You can now edit and remove testimonies. There's a user directory. Umm... I hope to get the whole adding friend's prayer request all done pretty soon.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

.:10:55:59 PM:.

Graphics are up! (sort of)

Yay!! We're so close to being done!

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

.:8:33:02 PM:.

Sessions and Frames...

In building this latest site the most 'cost-efficient' strategy to have a database-website and yet still have domain name is to buy a domain name and then have it point to your webhosting space. In the case of PassionatePrayer.com we definitely needed some database capability. I briefly considered the option to host it on the tower but then realized that we needed something even more reliable.

Using Zoneedit you can manage up to five domains (what they call zones) for free. It allows you to redirect pages, e-mail addresses, stuff that's really handy if all you own is a domain name. You're also able to do what's called cloaking. Normally when you forward a domain name to an address the forwarded address will appear in address bar (instead of passionateprayer.com it'll appear something like someaddress.com/directoryname/blah/blah/index.html ). This is ok but cloaking is much nicer (simpler). Anyways Zoneedit creates a frame and redirects the inner frame to the appropriate page. This at first seems like a perfect solution until you start using php sessions and location redirection. For some reason the redirection does not work-which is alright you can modify your php code to use the HTML refresh and bounce you to the appropriate page. Sessions on the other hand have no substitution. I haven't been able to explain why yet but the sessions do not seem to register when you're using frames. I used the exact same code in a non-framed page and it seemed to work fine. Maybe it has something to do with the session id created?

Minor things left to do on the site:

Sunday, February 15, 2004

.:1:29:51 AM:.

PHP E-mail Reminder

One of the things we'd like to have on the upcoming website is the ability to send out e-mail reminders to notify users that their show they signed up for is coming up. Since there are budget constraints (i.e. nil) we're currently using a free host that provides PHP and MySQL. The MySQL provides a database that allows you to store all your information into tables and you can then use PHP to parse through the results.

Unfortunately I haven't been having too much success with the e-mailling. It could be that the server was not compiled with the sendmail path properly (intentionally or unintentionally) placed. Anyways, I found this website called 'Christian-Web-Masters' which (Conveniently) had this tutorial on coding a simple php script to e-mail the results of a form back to a specific address. Maybe they'll show up in the morning :P

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