Web Log of Greg Mathews

I am pleased to confirm that eventually Scriptlance did respond to my withdrawel request over the weekend and actually processed the withdrawel this morning (GMT) as promised.

I would still stick to my original advice though about paying freelancers on Scriptlance as thanks to exchange rates and various fee’s etc this has cost me more than £20 GBP ($40 USD)  which is a big downer and not an amount I would want to lose on a regular basis.

After looking at the script running onmysitenow.com and making a few changes to the mysql commands used it looks like the script is running much better, it is suprising the difference one small change to the mysql can make.

I may even look at the yzoo code and see if the same changes can be made to that aswell.

Greg

After further testing of onmysitenow.com we have found that at certain times the server can not cope with the amount of traffic it is receiving already so I have disabled the counter until I have looked to see if it can be made more efficient and if not is a new dedicated server required.

The current state of the script is fine until there are in excess of 400 hits in any one minute at this point it starts to lag and if that level of traffic continues for a period then it slows to a halt.

I will announce as soon as the site is fullly functional again but in the mean time you can still add the code to your sites and register for better statistical information of your current visitors.

Greg

It has been more than a week since I last posted, what am I like?

Well last week I gave the php programmer who I had employed to complete a project for me one last  chance, we agreed he would give me daily updates and be complete by Saturday (yesterday).

Surprise Surprise I got one update of his progress that was after I messaged him a few times and I received no other contact so yesterday I requested the project be cancelled again. He then made me lauch by saying ‘i regret not having this completed.if you need what’s done so far, just let me know and i’ll send it to you.’

So if you plan on using Scriptlance  I suggest you do not use the freelancer Coddy, he is unreliable.

A few days ago I posted Do it yourself or get someone else to do it well today I was really disappointed when the programmer I selected showed me what he has done so far. He has taken two weeks so far to basically create a registration and log in routine. Once logged in nothing is working yet, the links are there for various functions but they are all inactive.

There is no design for the site, nothing. He has asked for a few more days to complete the project but based on what he has completed in two weeks I could imagine this taking at least another month.

I sure wish now I had done this myself in Perl, it would have been completed by now.

I do hope this is just a one off, and using Scriptlance really isn’t this bad normally. I am going to post another project on Scriptlance this week for a site design project with some integration to existing scripts, I will post here to let you know how it goes.

As many of you know I have been wanting to learn PHP but as of yet I have not managed to get myself motivated enough to do it.

Anyway two weeks ago  I thought I would post a project on Scriptlance to get someone to develop aPHP script for me. It was for a site clone and I thought if I get someone two write it in PHP it should be completed quicker and I could look at the code and learn from it.

Well the programmer I chose said it would take him 14 days, I thought OK, I could do it in perl quicker but I want to learn PHP so that is good for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone give me a kick up the ass.

Many of you will have read about the meta search engine I created last year. Well apart from a few glitches along the way generally the site is doing well, currently getting 300,000 page impressions each day.

The problem is now I can’t get motivated to do anything else, over the past year I have started a few projects and they have never been completed, I purchased some PHP books and apart from a quick glance I have done no more in my attempt to learn PHP.

To highlight how bad I have got, I had another idea for a project last week and rather do it myself I posted a project on Scriptlance and now have another programmer developing it for me. A year or so ago I would have never paid someone to do something I can do but now I am taking the attitude that if I pay someone else to do it then I know it will (should) get completed.

This is just not me and I need to get my self motivated again.

Greg

OK in my last post a few minutes ago I mentioned a login script I found and played with at http://evolt.org/article/comment/17/60265/index.html which is a great little script.

Although I want to learn how to do things in PHP I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, after just confirming that I had given the correct url, I found the author had released another version with more features, a few I have already done and others I have not done but had intended to.

So I am going to take a proper look at this later script available from http://evolt.org/PHP-Login-System-with-Admin-Features and see if I should start again using this version of the script or keep the one I have but just take a few idea’s from this one?

The reason I am using these script is they both have a great little ‘tutorial’ with them explaining what each file does.

Greg

OK over the past few weeks I’ve had to make some changes to improve the SERPs for some of my sites as a few where dropping out of the results seriously.

I have just this week started playing with PHP as mentioned in the last few posts, I am still not 100% sure of what I am doing but I thought the best place to start would be by having a members log in.

By searching the web I found a basic PHP login script at http://evolt.org/article/comment/17/60265/index.html which stores just the username and password. This turned out to be a good script to play with as it uses a mysql database as well as sessions.

Looking through this script I found it fairly simple to add things such as name, url etc to the registration page and display the members details once they have logged in.

I am hoping that while playing with these little php scripts I can work out exactly what I want to do with the information I pick up from it.

I promise that it will not be another month before I post again.

Greg

As previously mentioned I am going to take a look at PHP, I planned to do it this week but I am not a fan of reading from ‘text books’ so need to decide what script I want to write and then learn as I go.

Aswell as the books I mentioned in my previous post I have looked at the w3Schools PHP tutorial which I am likely to refer to quite often during my learning.

Doing a search of Yzoo.co.uk returns a few free PHP tutorials that may also be worth a look.

Now I am going to think of a script I want to write, something more usefull than the ‘hello world’ script that we all normally start with.