Projects
One of my favorite things about being a computer programmer is that there is such an outlet for doing what I am good at in the spare time. Between building useful (well I find them to be) websites for the entire globe to use and create my own / contributing time to open source projects, I have a hard time find time just to relax. Below is a list of the sites that I run (closed source, sorry guys) and the open source projects that I am a part of.
Where will you be tonight? Shows Tonight is a site that has had a long and jumbled history thus far. The site was originally a social networking site for bands to be able to promote themselves, their shows and connect to fans. Originally called Scene Kids (the domain was bought to mock a girl that threw it in my face that I was out of the scene. Seriously though, I must have missed that part of my life where I was a cool kid and in the scene) the site pre-dates MySpace as it was established in 2002. Unfortunately MySpace stomped the shit out of my concept and the site was forced into extinction. Lucky for me, I was able to come up with a way to reinvent the site in 2006. The new site was a search engine for concerts and events. The site was later revamped in 2008 based on feature usage. I plan to push the mobile market in the near future.
PHP Interface Collection of Killer Libraries to Enhance Stuff. PHP with PICKLES is the culmination of nearly a decade of PHP experience and turning it into a very light weight, easy to use MVC framework that I could use to run my numerous web sites off of. This system grew and evolved over time and eventually started to become stable enough to consider open sourcing and releasing to the masses. Right now I personally have a half dozen or so sites running across two different server running on PICKLES. The source is also being passed around to some developers to test out how useful it really is. I'm expecting to have a release of PHP with PICKLES available fourth quarter of 2008.
PHP Bindings for FANN
I was introduced to FANN back when I was messing around with predicting the outcome of Greyhound races (yet again). FANN is great, the bindings for PHP had not been maintained in quite a while, so I decided to get in touch with the project admins and see if I could take over. The admins were fine with it, and I started to get to work. Unfortunately, due to the amount of side work I've been doing as of late, my time to dedicate towards the bindings is nil. Currently I'm about half way done finishing up the rest of the bindings for version 1.2 and I have successfully compiled for 2.x, but the plan is to finish 1.2 and then freeze the version to focus more on the changes of 2.x. I'm hoping to get back to it by year end, it's been a great learning experience in both C (which I code in about once every 5 years) and PHP module writing, which I've never had a reason to do before.
Style Genie (name pending)
If you're anything like me, then you love CSS. If you're really like me, you probably end up putting in a lot of inline CSS due to time constraints or sheet laziness. That's where Style Genie is going to come in, if it's ever finished. Style Genie takes a file (or directory) strips out all of the styles and replaces them with class names that correspond to a CSS file that it generates and then links to from your file. Unfortunately it's very pre-beta right now and not ready for prime time. Fortunately, the project has gained quite a bit of interest by some of my peers, so the likelihood of completion is high. The project was my first project with Python, which is now my favorite language for writing command line scripts.
Quite possibly my first endeavour into releasing open source software (do my tutorials on Planet Source Code count?) b^2 was a very light weight (so I thought at the time) bulletin board system. The focus was building a solid and secure core and not worrying too much about fancy features and plug-ins. The last new version was released in like 2003 with a re-release under the GPL is I believe 2005 (the dates are a bit fuzzy, it's been a while). What's absolutely nuts about it, is that even after all of this time, the code is still being downloaded fairly regularly and I get emails from time to time asking questions or submitting patches. It's almost been enough to spark my interest to re-write it from the ground up, perhaps as a PICKLES shared model. We'll see, only time will tell.