Royce's SOU Ed Tech Blog

My MySql-PHP Site

2007-06-04T23:28:00.001-07:00

Check out my walkthrough of the progressing project: Here it is.

Book Report Posting #3

2007-05-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

Well, I finished the book and found it to be pretty good. I'm still working on my site, but I'm a little discouraged now, because I can do pretty much anything I want with it now (user accounts, template styles, uploads, libraries, blogs, etc.), but I'm worried about security.

The book had little or no information on making your site resistant to hackers. In further research, I've found some easy things to do to make log-ins and sessions more secure, but I'm still nervous about doing anything major (like creating a commercial database-driven site) until I can find out more about security.

Other than that, it was a good intro book to databases and PHP. I'd recommend it to someone interested in learning.

Book Report Posting #2

2007-05-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I've started a few projects using this book as a guide, and I've been having success integrating databases into the design process. It really helps when you have a TON of different pages that all have the same structure and will be great once I figure out how to make and manage user accounts effectively.
The main project that I'm working on now is for a Power Skills Class that I'm developing for our school. I'm creating a Power Skills Manager that lists all the different projects students can do to gain 'proficiencies' in different computer applications. Each time they gain a proficiency they get a special icon in their 'My Achievements' bar that reveals their level of expertise. There will be a hall of fame for the top ten students or so in all the classes to reveal their awards, and all of it will be handled with user accounts.
Here is an image of the page so far:

Book Report Posting #1

2007-04-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL
By: Kevin Yank

I picked up this book, because I've been designing small-scale Websites for a while now and wanted to learn how to do some more advanced things. I've been able, for instance, to design just about anything I wanted from a visual perspective (navigation elements, layouts, etc.), but I didn't have the coding knowledge necessary to create online catalogs with search elements and user accounts (and all which stems from that: shopping carts, personalized welcome pages, etc.).

This book is written for someone like me, with experience in HTML, but nothing in the way of PHP coding or MySQL database structuring know-how. So, it's understandable and provides great tutorials for creating databases in MySQL and getting to know PHP scripts. I'm part way through it now, but I've already picked up on how to do a few things that I hadn't been able to do before. For instance, I've discovered how to create my own page templates in PHP (which makes designing and changing pages WAY faster than it otherwise would be with simple HTML), and I can code some rudimentary elements now from the ground up like a page counter (I've installed one at http://www.eagleridgehigh.us/ ; at the bottom of the page you'll see a white number that changes every time someone refreshes or opens the page).

At this point in the book, the author is really focusing on developing limited proficiency in PHP and MySQL as separate applications and, I assume, later will put the two together. MySQL is fun, but it's a database, and so, doesn't hold a lot of appeal to me in and of itself, other than that it will be beneficial once I learn to integrate it into Web pages with PHP.