for keeping track of my digital experiments

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.