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.

I had to do it. It's been bugging me for a long time now. I had to update my site's URLs. More specifically, I had to update my site's article URLs (along with some others). I've been putting this off for a long time because I knew it was going to be a lot of tedious work updating all my URLs and adding a whole bunch of rewrite rules. Well, I finally forced myself to sit down and do this. Prepare for mass breakage.

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!

Throughout the past several years, since WebNV and its cms have been in development, I've gone through numerous WYSIWYG editors to help with content creation. While a lot of them were nice, I always seemed to be annoyed by some feature, or lack of feature, or bug that seemed to plauge virtually every editor. But with TinyMCE, I finally found a perfect editor.

A little more than six months ago I showed you guys the back end, or administration side of my site. This tool or Administration Panel is where I put together my site. It's where I moderate my visitors' comments, create and edit my articles, create and edit site pages, and edit site or personal settings. You can check out the older preview here and laugh at it's horrible design and amateurish features. I know I do.

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.

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.

Well, in a certain sense anyways. Most of the time they're just pathetic little programs that try their hardest to post Viagra ads on your site. But over the past few years WebNV has seen more and more spammers access this site and try to post their garbage. I hate to say it but some do get through. And since I'm running my own cms, it means a lot more work for me to try and stop them. Luckily I like a challenge.

In my previous post I stated that for the Fall Reboot I was completely redesigning my site.  This included building a new CSS file from scratch that will help to determine the layout, colors, and overall theme of my site.  Let me tell you right now that building a site completely off CSS is a pain in the ass.

Slowly but surely I'm learning CSS (cascading style sheets). CSS is kind of like HTML in how it's used to create and format web sites.

I like CSS because it's a lot cleaner and easier to work with than HTML. Anyways, check out my practice site if you wish, and who knows, it may become my new site.

Me an my buddy of mine decided to put together a PlayStation 3 fan site. This site is dedicated to the upcoming game console, the PS3. Although the PS3 wont be out in the US until later in 2006, seeing the development and previews of the system and its games is exciting.