Matthew Knott

Site Objectives

When I started this site, my initial objective was just to create a blog site for myself, mainly to help me remember useful bits of information and code that I come across, but already it's become much more than that.

Whatever your trade you need to practice and to keep up with changing times, and this is my practice room. Well one of them. PHP is not my first language so to speak, although I love it far more than the asp I'm used to working with. The little add-on's, the admin suite and other features are all just great ways to learn new techniques and approaches.

Why are there ad's on the site?

Aside from myself and the google spider, there's no one else here, so why have adverts on the site. Experimentation is the answer. I've never tried anything with Google Adsense before so why not here. It was actualy a good experiment, the ad's took about a week to show up which I wasn't expecting so I'm glad I tried it now, rather than panic at a later date.

What have you done here then?

Firstly, I created a funky tagging system. I preach about the benefits of tagging all the time in work, but rarely have an oportunity to implement such a system. I'd already created a white paper on how to implement a tagging system, including the database schema, and logic flow for the code. My particular implementation of that system uses an onblur ajax function that slices all the tags up and adds them to the database. It's fast and works well which is really all I can ask for.

On the back of the tags came the tag cloud. I'm really proud of this, mainly because I looked for an existing solution to save time, but found that it was easier to write my own. It's neat, and looks good, and it really is the best way to highlight the topics you talk about a lot, and hence improves navigation speed.

Finally, this is the first time I've used mod_rewrite in apache and it's just so easy it's unreal.

I have a lot of plans for further development so no doubt this list will change.