I haven’t written anything in a long time have I? Partly it’s been due to an extremely heavy workload but it’s also been due to the fact that I’ve been guilty about the fact that there hasn’t been any appreciable progress with the next release of Blog :p However, I see that that’s not going to happen for a while now and so I’ve decided to start posting again both here and at SM as often as I can – even if there is no Blog related news – just to keep the sites running and whoever is interested (if there are any faithful readers :p) updated.
So what have I been busy with if I’m not coding Blog? Well, at work I’ve been handed the new task of writing project proposals for the company since both people who used to do the job have suddenly decided to leave one after the other. So, I’m left with a task that I positively hate :p While I don’t mind writing stuff, project proposals just make me want to gag due to the amount of BS that you find people putting in there – I just can’t do that. I’d rather state the reasons why we should be hired clearly and concisely instead of writing reams and reams of hyperbole that nobody would read anyway – but that’s the business world for you .. or something like that. Anyway, I just got done with one such proposal (my first actually) and will have to start work on the next on Monday.
In the meantime, I’ve got my first real, paying client from Geek for Hire 🙂 So I’ve been working on that project during the evenings and my spare time. It’s an interesting PHP project since it’s an area that I’d not covered in PHP before – in fact, I’d not even been aware that you could do something like this with PHP before the project came along and now I have a pretty strong liking for PHP just because of the versatility it’s shown 🙂 So what’s the project? It’s a set of web pages to create an image on the fly based on user input text and a font, font size and font colour specified by the user. I completed a demo for the client a while back and have been working away at the final product for the last couple of days. I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turning out and hope the client is too 🙂
Finally, I’m doing another project whenever I have a bit of time to spare – again in PHP but also utilizing mySQL. This one’s a remote commenting system for Blogs (or anything else as well, if you want to use it that way) similar to the service offered by HaloScan, YACS, Ennetation etc. Is it any different from any of the previously mentioned services? Not really – except that the implementation may be slightly different since I’ve not looked at any of those services for ideas :p But the reason I wrote it was so that I’d have access to multiple commenting systems without having to re-deploy the same commenting script that I’d been using in multiple directories. Plus, since then a friend who has no access to PHP has expressed interest in a remote commenting system as well and so for the moment the system is just being developed for those reasons 🙂 In the future however, I might consider using the system a bit more broadly since it does allow multiple commenting systems under multiple owners and will have fairly extensive configuration options ranging from template based page design to an obscenity/swear word filter to smiley support … but all that is for the future, first I must get the basic system up and running 🙂
HEY! Faithful reader here! Love your program!! Waiting patiently for your updated version to be released. Ok not so patiently, love it so much, I keep coming back to check if its out!!!! =)