FusionMods

I just read this article from one of my favorite sites.

To sum it all up, even the educational sources are starting to jump ship from printed media. The costs are high and the circulation numbers are low. Now since this is coming from a science journal you’d probably ask yourself, why’d it take these guys so long to adapt? Well there’s still a number of reasons to keep printing. Honestly, people enjoy having a physical object in their hands to read. Personally I’m against eBooks, I can’t even take them seriously, but for some types of media, i love nothing more than to have it at my finger tips.

I think this article really brings some of the finer points to the table though, and while it’s hard for any industry to adapt, this does offer some great incentives. The first part is news should be free, and never subscription based when it’s online. The simple reason is, no matter what it is you’re publishing it’ll take about 30 seconds for google to grab it and give it to the entire web. So just open your content because people will just get it somewhere else if they can’t get it from your source.

Second, this covers what the web is based on. Expand your content from just a simple string of text. Include related documents, discussions, and topics. Give the option to send it to your friends. Expand upon it by keeping all of your media related.

Finally enhance it. Now that we’re not going to be based 100% on paper, start using that infinite space you’re given… Include images, galleries, discussion, and especially videos. I do understand that this seems huge to businesses based in print, but really the options here are infinite.

The biggest hesitation is it’s a lot of work to get converted. First you need to create an online presence. That is a lot of work. But the biggest part is redeveloping your entire business to run off a whole new business model. And beyond that it’s changing the mind sets of everyone involved. Writers no longer write to fill a block of text, they write till they’re happy they conveyed their message. News papers no longer rely on selling their content to readers, they sell to advertisers (and please don’t have a 5 column site with one column dedicated to a story and the other 4 dedicated to ads, everyone hates that).

Now I want to stop before I get into a rant, but I think this article really gives the pro’s of transitioning to an electronic edition. I don’t think print media will ever go out of style, but I think theres a shift in demand thats already changed the game.

And I’ll close it with just a few last words. It’s really important to do this right. like I was saying in this post, it’s the internet… Don’t confine yourself to just reproduce printed media straight to the web, make it enhanced, include all those features I mentioned above. I mean if you’re producing media of any kind it’s for the reader right? Well thats all you ever have to keep in mind. Make the experience for the reader exactly what you feel it should be, because with the internet, the only limitation is yourself.

I’ve been programming a while and I stumbled accross some much older code of mine and thought of some of the changes I’ve made to my work over the last couple years. After looking at it I wanted to post a like 10 tips I’d like to give to other beginners.

Tip 1: Always think about your code.
Now this really applies to a lot of things, but the main focus here is, make sure everything makes sense. Just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s done right. It’s really important to look at something and say to yourself, “but how can this go wrong?”

Tip 2: Plan like theres no tomorrow
Hopefully everyone does this already, but I have what I’ve come to call my programming notebook. In this book you’ll see page flow charts, psuedo coded blocks of code, and tons of database layouts. It’s good to have a solid idea of how everything will work before you start typing. After all, you don’t want to be half way through your project and realize you programmed a bug in it that’ll require you to spend hours longer to fix what you should have noticed in the begining.

Tip 3: Don’t always assume…
This is one of my favorites, because I still see this being done in a lot of common 3rd party apps. The most common place I see it iwith the $_GET and $_POST. First, don’t just assume they made the page load, especially the $_GET. always check with an if isset(). Secondly, check they have a value, check it’s the right type of value. Hackers love that people don’t check these. Lastly, plan for errors to happen. If you get a value that isn’t there, even though it’s susposed to be, redirect the page to an error instead of showing that fun php error message.

Tip 4: Injection what?
SQL injection is a huge thing to look out for. Since this is aimed at new developers, this is when someone injects a text field with something that’ll break out of the current sql request, and do something more maliscious like drop a table. Again, this comes back to Tip 1, the best way to keep things safe is to do an htmlspecialchars($val,ENT_QUOTES); on all your fetched vars. This also keeps the output safe too since it can’t alter your site layout code.

Tip 5: Think Modular
Now as a beginner this isn’t much more than good habbit, but it’s something that you really should start with from the beginning. PHP is an object oriented language so treat it like one. When you code in a modular fashion, updates are 100 times easier. Building new sites based on previous chunks of code can be done 100 times easier.

Tip 6: Develope shortcuts
This is more or less an extension of Tip 5, but I keep a php file called functions.php which has some of the most common used functions i find myself going for. functions like getVar(’name’,'method’). I also have a users.php, mysql.php, and many others.

Tip 7: Plan for tomorrow
This one has saved me tons of time in the past. This is something i can’t usually stress enough… Make sure you fully understand the project you’re working on. To that end, once you understand it you can get a feel for future functionality you might need to put into the code. Say someone wants a feed that’ll autogenerate download links for an eZine, well even though they don’t want it now, they might want some tracking in there in the future. So place some comments here and there with that stuff in mind. Make sure you’re code will support that in an easy to do way. It’s really amazing how an extra 10-15 minutes can save a huge amount of time in the future.

Tip 8: Document!!!
Now I’m not telling you guys to document things to the degree that php.net or even like the javadoc uses (though that would be pretty nice, lol). But in your code it’s ultra handy to make a one or two sentence description of your functions, even if it’s just something like, “helper function for ‘that’ function”. Also document big steps in your code. If you pick up a site after leaving it along for a year, or you have to work on someone elses code, you’ll really appreciate large amount of documentation. And have fun with it. I leave fun comments like, “Time for the SQL magic” all the time.

Tip 9: keep it clean
This is perfect for following the documentation. As part of your organization, you’ll want to keep code organized. Create difference php files for different sections of code. Make

Tip 10: Always bite off more than you can chew.
Now this one sounds a little more dangerous, but what i’m saying is always keep pushing yourself forward. Your a programmer, if you can understand the concepts of how things work, you can make them happen, even if you’ve never done them before. I’m bringing new ajax functionality to my sites all the time. This is just the way our field works, and we will always need to be picking up new skills.

Well to start this off, I will state, that for DSL internet the service is a lot better than I’d expected. The TV isn’t as clear as Cable, but when you don’t have any other options, there just isn’t much that you can really do about it.

But to my Greivences… I feel I want to share this with the world, even though I’m sure I’m not the first. As a business, I’m really just let down with this company.

To start things off, whenever I have to call the company, I feel like I want to punch a hole in the wall, and i’m a pretty calm person, I’ve had a number of people tell me they’re suprised with how cool headed i can stay, but after going through 10-15 minutes of automated phone stuff to talk to a live person, i’d be shocked to find anyone else saying, “it’s no big deal”. This is an incredibly annoying process. They do this through voice recognition, so it’s never “press 1 for…” it’s “tell me your problem” and, “Did you mean to say…?”. This is particularly annoying because when you’re getting angry, you can’t just start cursing to yourself, because it’ll mess up the phone call, lol. Now I wish that was the most annoying part, but honestly it isn’t. The most annoying part of the call comes after the 10-15 minutes after you get through the automated stuff to a live person, just for them to ask for all that information again… But atleast at this point, you’re only 30 minutes into the call, they haven’t even helped you dianose any cable or tv issue like you’re only 3 yrs old

The last time I called in, I needed to correct the name on my bill since it was recorded wrong, it took 45 minutes. I mean my last name is only 3 letters long, so it can happen to anyone, but that averages out to 15 minutes a letter, whats up with that?

So my next issue is with the fact that one of the two companies (since they come as a pair) have given out my contact information to every junk mail dealer in the country.. I know what you’re all thinking, “How do you know it was them?” Well I know it was them from the mis-spelled last name I just mentioned. I mena I’m in a slightly unique scenario where I just moved into my new house and still haven’t even transfered most my accounts for everything to this new address yet so there really aren’t too many services that even could contact me there yet, but like I said, I have been flooded with junk mail already, which i find extremly unnecessary.

Now like I said, the service itself hasn’t been all that bad, all my problems lay with the company itself. The thing that I do find most disapointing through all of this is it’s only come about through a complete lack of options. In all honesty, I didn’t plan to have DSL internet and satellite TV. Speed and quality is pretty important to me. DSL just doesn’t have the throughput that cable internet provides, and Satellite TV just doesn’t have the clarity of anything with a hard line coming in.

Ok guys, I know this turned out to be a bit of a rant post, but seriously, who wouldn’t rant about 45 minutes just to change your billing name?

Next week I’ll have a more upbeat posting. I’m starting to network my house (i know, I expected to be at this stage a couple months ago), so I’ll be posting a nice article on home networking, including tools, how-to’s, and a lot of pictures, because we both know, pictures are what bring it all together, haha. I’ve already just lightly started the project, and it’s going pretty smoothly. The only downside is crawling through the 100 degree attic here and there, lol