for keeping track of my digital experiments

Today I finished up a major contract coding job today for this clothing company called Hullabaloo Apparel. They create very unique designs and then print them on various clothing items. Their idea of clothing is not for quick laughs or in-crowd designs (like most online clothing shops), but universally sweet designs. From the various things I’ve heard from Erik and Yuriah (the co-founders), they have already been doing quite well, and needed a web-presence to expand their market and for explaining their brand. Which is where I came in.

About two and a half weeks ago, after showing Yuriah a few tricks with his Mac, he asked me if I would be up for doing the website for Hullabaloo Apparel. They needed a website up asap. So I cracked out various designs from what Yuri described to me and settled on the fourth design in a series of high-contrast xhtml/css designs I put together.

So I jammed away this past week, after getting approval, and am now done.

A couple of things I wanted to write down:

1. PayPal has an integrated shopping cart that can take in many different variables (such as sizes)
2. PayPal has integrated shipping calculators (for various locales) when a user checks out
3. Instant Payment Notification works best for subscriptions and individual (digital service) items; it looks best to have the IPN script running on a SSL host
4. It is possible to give site owners access to Google Analytics on the fly, by setting up a Google account with an email of your choice; and then use said account via an auto-login script
5. Submitting a form via a JavaScript link is done like so (where “monkey” is the name of the form. <form name=”monkey”></form>: <a href="javascript:document.monkey.submit();">Submit Form "Monkey"</a>

I just starting working with what the developer community calls AJax about four months ago. Now I’m working on a massive database driven portal with a huge amount AJax calls to backend PHP scripts. I had the PHP down, but I needed to learn AJax fast. How did I do it? It only took about an hour of Javascript brush-up work and another hour of reading and working with the two following tutorials.

My first really helpful encounter with the concept of AJax was the Ajax and XMLHttpRequest Tutorial which includes a step by step source code representation of the process to making the necessary asynchronous Javascript requests. The second tutorial that I suggest is Dynamic Drive’s Basic Ajax Routine (Get & Post), which includes many source code and running examples, plus downloadable fully functioning scripts.

If you have a basic knowledge of Javascript and PHP (or some other server-side scripting language) you are ready to go implement some AJax after reading through these two tutorials.

Today started out with a woeful surprise. Snow!?!? Yeah I know I’ve lived here in Minnesota for almost five years now, and I’ve never seen snow this late in April. I hadn’t coded in awhile, not for about two weeks. Desayuné, me lavé los dientes y me puse mis ropas en el cuerpo. After that I started up my laptop.

I had recieved an email from Scott VanderVeer Thursday night, asking me about The Source. The Source is an early scripting job that I did for the youth group at Trinity Presbyterian Church that I was more actively a part of in the past. This was before I become a more regular attendee and member of Emmanuel Mennonite Church. The Source kind of died out about 5-6 months ago. Maybe Scott can give it the new blood it needs to take off again. So the first half of the day was spent interspersed between giving Scott assistance on the finer points of DNS issues and PHP scripting, interspersed with various household chores.

After lunch was spent working on a contract coding job for these guys that call themselves, “Tribal Shaman” and “Zerja Sone”. They are working this upstart cracking/hacking network called XSSLink and Prohacks.org. I got called in to write the backend PHP/MySQL data processing and arrange the hosting, as they have other tasks at hand. Something about affiliates and investment return. I would have to say that the XSSLink backend is my craziest undertaking to date. “Tribal Shaman” wanted a completely Plug ‘n Play tracking method in Javascript as well as a monetized linking system at minimal cost. So I will be attempting to load balance across a couple free hosts. It will be risky but worth the payout.

And now as I write this at almost half past 11pm I feel my body asking to sleep. Which then got me thinking about this interesting venture called, Rockabye Baby!. The go by the logo, “Transform your favorite rock music into baby music.” They Green Day riff on the front page certainly sounds calming. Just imagine a couple years down the road, “Daddy … why do you have a different version of my lullaby music on your computer?” Which could turn into a valuable teaching moment about the world in general and what the artists are getting at when they offer up their work to the world.