Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

PatronusCharm 1.1 Beta Release - Midnight CST

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Long overdue, I am finally releasing PatronusCharm 1.1 Beta. This will soon be followed up by 1.1.1 with miscellaneous improvements and changes I felt were unimportant for the 1.1 release. The changes and new features are numerous, and I may forget plenty but here are some highlights. Sphinx Search Sphinx, as you ...

Google Gears: Offline Applications

Monday, July 28th, 2008

What is Google Gears? As defined by the Gears website... Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features: A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server A database, to ...

Sphinx Search: MySQL Fulltext Search Engine Replacement

Monday, July 21st, 2008

For PatronusCharm 1.0.0 and 1.0.1, we've used the MySQL fulltext search engine. That's a mouthful, right? MySQL is the database software PatronusCharm utilizes to store all of the data used in PatronusCharm. It stores users, stories, news articles, FAQ items, everything. As you well know, a search engine is needed ...

New Feature: Document Multi-Uploader

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

In the past, when uploading stories I've noticed how long it takes to upload stories. It's even worse for authors who are posting previously written stories. Thus I've developed (to Shezza's delight), a way to upload multiple documents. Due to the funky way Javascript reads the Document Object Model, which ...

XML Syndication

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Syndication XML Syndication is a means of distributing content to other websites and users in a quick and easy format. It can be used to syndicate summaries of content, all content, updates, anything the creator needs to be passed out in a simple to use format. These are commonly known as ...

Current development: Memcache, Tagging

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

I, as a developer, have an insatiable urge to optimize, simplify, and speed up my code. There are developers out there that would have no qualms running a query like this every time somebody hit their site. [sql]SELECT (SELECT COUNT(userid) FROM users) AS users, (SELECT COUNT(id) FROM reviews) AS reviews, (SELECT COUNT(chapterid) FROM chapters) ...