Web Developer Musings

Over the last week I have been working on a small project called with the highly imaginative working title 'Chat'. This is a simple (but totally modern) chat room I aim to release as an Open Source product that can stand-alone or be worked into an existing website.

I started 'Chat' to learn, experiment and refine various web development technologies. Most importantly for me it is based on PHP 5.2 and is neatly arranged into a single class. I have found stepping up to a more recent version of PHP really stands out when manipulating files for the self-installer as it has created a more streamlined process, and hopefully using a single class it will make the program secure while also being an easy platform for developers to work with.

This is also the first time I have built a program specifically with AJAX functionality in mind. Actions such as posting a message and logging in are all controlled in a simple file that is able to work individually so it can be called directly by Javascript. As it turns out sending form data and pulling content from a database is not nearly as difficult as I had imagined, requiring less than 1KB of - admittedly of fairly obtuse - code, and by starting the Javascript last 'Chat' should degrade neatly if anything goes wrong. This is also the first time I have written any code to work with JSON which isn't exactly exciting or interesting but should be useful for me in the future.

Lastly and least importantly the default template of 'Chat' uses CSS3 for rounded corners, drop shadows and zebra striping.

I hope to start up a project page soon (I'm not sure whether to use Google Code, GitHub or Sourceforge - any thoughts?).

With a huge choice of free blogs available it was a long process finally selecting one to power this website. Many open source applications are too fat or outdated and so like many I have often used Wordpress as a basis for many sites as it ticks most of the boxes you could want. However, as it increases in size (both file and user base) I find it is becoming less desirable for a small website application.

Developing with Wordpress has become too complicated for me. Finding what you need to modify can be a nightmare, usually needing a long trawl through a myriad of deprecated files and functions and the super-size community often means no response to your SOS plea. So as much as a fan of Wordpress' new interface and the flexibility it has I no longer enjoy working with it.

Pixie was built by Scott Evans of Toggle; a small UK based web, branding and packaging company. I chose it not because of its interface (which is good) or plug-ins but because it was easy to work with. The power is not found embedded within functions functions but as a simple file structure and code attractive to any intermediate PHP developer. It's an elegant structure I found worked well for my light blogging needs, without resorting to a bare-bones package and building up.

This site was built as a combination of Pixie and ForumCMS. The administration-side is Pixie and the front-end is my own which means I don't have to learn any new template commands and any extra functionality needs no reference to documentation. The site took around 1 week to build over a few spare hours and I didn't once get stressed.