I've been busy, busy, busy working on my content management system, NiBuM. It's basically getting a complete overhaul. I'm getting rid of a lot of old, ugly code that I first used when learning PHP. I have a much better understanding of OOP than I did a few years ago and I'm now putting it to good use.

While most people are perfectly fine just seeing the date of an item, it's also nice to be able to show your visitors the age of this item as well. By 'age', I mean how long ago an item was published, or modified, or added, etc. The below function will help you easily display the item's age. All you have to do it pass it the item's date.

Creating an auto-save feature for the TinyMCE editor was a lot easier than I thought it would be. This can be due to the ease of working with TinyMCE or the ease of working with jQuery (my javascript library of choice), or both. Here I'm going to explain how to create an auto-save and recovery feature with a MySQL database. Let's begin!

I finally integrated the anti-spam tool called Akismet into my comments system. Akismet is a third-party app that checks all comments that are submitted and declares them as either spam or not. They use their own methods to run a newly submitted comment through hundreds of tests. If the comment comes back as legitimate then it'll be posted on my site. If it's considered spam, then my site will still save it but mark it as spam so only I can see it. From there I can then go ahead and either delete it, or mark it as non-spam.

*Sigh* For the past few weeks I've been working on a new template system for my site. The previous one I implimented was rushed and based off the Smarty Template Engine. I didn't use Smarty but tried to develop something similar to it for my site. While it did work, it was still very limited and not very user friendly when it came to creating new site templates. So I decided to scrap it and redesign my system based off Wordpress' template design. This new system I've actually put a lot of time and effort into and finally got it to my liking last night. So today I decide to go live with it and sure enough, a few thousand things break.

In my ongoing effort to stop comment spam from getting through, I've decided to implement IP address blocking and referrer blocking. I never really wanted to block IP's or visitors from certain referrers from accessing my entire site, but decided to build a little script to do so anyways. I guess I should start being a little tougher on these spambots.

Not that you guys will notice anything, but I converted my site into a template system. What is a template system? Well, it pretty much means my site will run off a single template. For example, I have a basic template setup that includes just HTML and CSS. I then have my entire site run through that template to format the page for you guys. It's nice for a few reasons. For one, it helps to separate the raw site coding from the design side of things. Keeping things separate is a good thing.

Never do I feel such a sense of accomplishment as I do when I spend over a week doing some hardcore coding, and logic thinking to finally see my finished product.  After several trials and errors I finally have a working tag cloud.  For those who don't know, a tag cloud pretty much shows what I post about the most.  The bigger the tag (category) in the cloud, the more post that are related to it.  You can check out an official definition of a tag cloud here.

I've gotten a few request these past few months about offering a lighter themed version of this site.  Some people I guess don't like dark sites.  It's hard for some people to read.  So I created a new css file that can be used on this site.  Well, actually it's a modified version of my original css theme that I created when I first started this site.

In my continuing effort to successfully make my own blog I completely over looked the use of search friendly URLs.  A search friendly URL is a URL that people, or more importantly, search engines can easily find and index.  An example of a search friendly URL is this:

I was never really a Java fan before.  As a matter of fact I was never really a fan of any web programming that would run client-side (like Flash or Java).  Server-side programming is the way to go with coding like PHP and ASP.  When building a web site using Java or Flash you have to wonder if your client will have Java or Flash installed on their computer.  Because if they don't then they won't be able to see or use any of the Java or Flash on your site.  With server-side programming you don't have to worry about that.  They don't have to have PHP or ASP installed on their computers to see your PHP or ASP web site.  Makes more sense right.

For awhile now, I've been trying to figure out how to have section that list just the most popular or most liked posts on this site. Or maybe list links to the most popular stories on the right hand side.

The comments system is back up and running again on this site. For the past several days I've been fighting spam showing up in the comments area.

It's these damn bots that crawl or surf the site and post 'fake' comments that do nothing more than spam it up with advertisments. I freakin' hate it. It got so bad that every few minutes I would have to go in and delete four or five new entries. I finally disabled the comments until I could figure out what to do to stop the spam.