- user registration (with optional e-mail verification)
- user login
- lost account retrieval
- password changing
- user session management
- password protecting certain pages or sections of your website

It is built using the CodeIgniter PHP framework so you will need that installed until we port it for general use. Check it out, there’s a fully working online demo and user guide with lots of documentation as well!

Why?

Before my time, Microsoft introduced Windows as a revolutionary new platform for developers make everyone’s lives easier. Apple came out with their aesthetic, remarkably easy interface that made (almost) everyone want a new Mac.

It wasn’t long before these big companies like IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, HP and of course Apple knew what was coming down the train tracks. These revolutionary new personal computers were going to change everyone’s life.

And they did. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world and Steve Jobs continues to lead the technology industry with their classy products.

So where does Facebook come in?

Microsoft and Apple have maintained their operating systems for many years now and will continue to dominate that market. There are a few new systems that pop up, such as Linux and Ubuntu, but the two that will always be there are Windows and Mac. BUT as you may know, we are going through a rapidly changing era where the internet is transforming business, medicine, law, and daily life! The transformation of web2.0 technology enables us to entertain ourselves with YouTube, read news stories from hundreds of different sources, and outsource business projects to other companies for cheaper than ever possible. We can meet our future husbands and wives online and write on our friends’ virtual walls on Facebook and MySpace.

OK, so I know about web2.0, what about Facebook?!

This last spring of 2007 Facebook launched its developer platform, unleashing web developers to create their own online software programs enhancing user profiles on facebook, providing more content and entertainment while in the process making lots of money! Everyone wants software to be interactive these days. In the U.S., I can say that most of everyone I meet has broadband internet access. Businesses can’t work without e-mail, internet access, and instant messaging. People can’t sit on the computer for 18 hours out of the day without internet access. The wave of the new internet has brought so many opportunities and there is still a lot to come. Instead of programming a game to play against a computer, we now have Wiis, X Box 360s, and computers that rely on your connection to the internet as a necessity to play. People want interactiveness, and they’ve got it with web2.0.

Web2.0 allows for mass collaboration, information sharing, and social networking at an overwhelming pace. In order to keep up, you almost can’t stay off the computer learning the new stuff for a day!

With that, I would like to say: If you haven’t joined facebook, do so. You will have a blast, especially if you know people already on it. If you are a developer, check out the developer platform and get to know it. It just may provide a new business opportunity!

Thanks for reading, comments are welcome!

If you go to www.weebly.com and sign up with your username and email you can start building your website in seconds. It uses a pretty AJAX interface, so that means you need to have Javascript enabled or you won’t be able to use Weebly. You can drag and drop any desired element to the page, including paragraphs, pictures, custom HTML or even pre-built Google Map widgets! If you have used Microsoft Word, you will probably find this tool a piece of cake!

For those of you who have looked into other WYSIWYG editors you probably know that they can be very expensive, especially if you don’t have time to learn new programming languages and spend a bunch of money. If you like cool web2.0 freebies head over to weebly and learn how to create website pages using WYSIWYG editors!

1. Learn XHTML.
2. Learn CSS.

These two components are essential to building a solid website. If you build a large business website without knowing XHTML and CSS, you will be banging your head on the desk from troubles with cross-browser compatibility, search engine optimization, maintainability and more later down the road. If you need help learning XHTML and CSS, you can visit W3Schools or search for tutorials on Google. They aren’t very hard to pick up, and I can show you what your starting XHTML/CSS code will look like if you visit this test page.

That is the core part of any webpage. None of it should be left out, however you can always use a separate file for styling called a style sheet so the top of your webpage doesn’t have a bunch of styling in the header. Most of the what you will be editing will be inside the body tags, such as adding layered divs, images, text and hyperlinks.

After you are somewhat familiar with XHTML and CSS, you can find XHTML/CSS layouts so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. There are some that are better than others and just make sure that the layouts you find use layered divs instead of tables. Layered divs may be harder to learn, but they save a lot of time down the road. You can use the layouts as a starting point to building your webpage. Some things to remember while building your first web pages are:

• Use heading tags (h1, h2, h3). Search engines place more weight on keywords in these tags. Make sure not to overload your pages with keyword phrases, however.
• XHTML is only more cross-browser friendly if you close all of your tags. If you comply with this standard you will have an overall better website.
• Try to substitute text for images when possible. Less images means less loading time and more content for visitors and search engines.

After you create your new XHTML/CSS webpage using my tutorial on how to design a website, you can validate them at validator.w3.org to make sure they are compliant with XHTML transitional.

In order to create dynamic, interactive pages you need to learn a programming language such as PHP. PHP is used in conjunction with a MySQL database if you need one to provide more functionality such as an online store, blog, or just for capturing visitor information. I use a PHP framework called CodeIgniter that takes care of the basics when it comes to building websites such as session handling, database connetion and data retrieval, and also provides you more organization when building websites. If you want to learn more about CodeIgniter, read my article about building your first PHP web2.0 app.

I carry my business cards around in a case from my favorite place to go.

Our website is not that web2.0 looking, but it’s simple and very easy to navigate. We do of course build web2.0 websites however if you are interested

If you like the business cards, you can order them @ moo.com.

There are a lot of new technologies out there such as blogging, podcasting, social bookmarking and networking, search engine optimization, internet marketing and web2.0. I have been researching these technologies about 40 hours a week this summer to understand how everything fits together. Now, I want to share what I compiled. It’s a basic laundry list and doesn’t go very in depth, but there are a lot of excellent resources in this guide. If anyone has anything to add, please comment!

I. Website ad planning, placement, and analytics:

A. Conducting market research in your company’s field will provide relevant ways to reach potential clients. Some free market research tools/directories from the leaders in the online industry:

1. Google Trends: Find the top trends in the world - what people are searching for most
2. Ebay Pulse: Find what people are buying or looking to buy
3. Google Groups: Find what people are talking about relevant to your industry
4. Technorati: Find the top company/personal blogs
5. Alexa: See what websites are growing fast in the world
6. WordTracker: Free keyword generator/lookup for your industry

B. Using Google Adwords for relevant advertising for your target audience. Google is the best at matching a target audience to what they are looking for and you pay for clicks to your website, not impressions.

C. Tracking your website traffic and source of visitors, whether organic (by search engine using keywords or by referring sites) or by paid advertisements with Google Analytics. This tool also integrates seamlessly with Google Adwords.

II. Use of social networking sites to build online presence.

A. Facebook: An online networking website now open to companies
B. MySpace: An online networking website open to anyone
C. LinkedIn: A growing online community for companies
D. Delicous: A community bookmarking website
E. Digg: A newspaper where top stories rise to the front page
F. Netscape: A community bookmarking website
G. Twitter: A SMS (cell phone text messaging) news website

III. Using (free) Web2.0 sites to market your company through new media. All of the following are ways to let the community know what you are up to. Building a subscriber base to your blogs, podcasts, press releases, etc. can drive traffic to your website and keep the community informed. Providing RSS feeds also makes your company news accessible to mobile devices.

A. YouTube Videos/Podcasting

1. Essential to marketing in 2007 providing media for mobile devices (cell phones, iPhones, iPods).
2. Provides a free way to promote through audio/video.

B. Blogs

1. Blogs are the fastest growing way to market your company online.
2. They are easy to set up and build dramatic website traffic quickly.
3. Provide current information for readers and content for search engines.
4. They are the easiest way to increase your search engine ranking.

IV. Staying current with webinars, message boards and RSS feeds.

A. Thirty Day Challenge: An online marketing course with cutting-edge, unprecedented ways to market online.
B. Message Boards: Discuss topics in your industry with other companies like yours.
C. Google Reader: Stay current by subscribing to news, company press releases, blogs, podcasts, etc. who provide RSS feeds.
D. 9Rules: Blog Aggregator/Community Message Board/Blog.

Finding ‘Slayerment’ on the Digg home page a few days ago, I browsed the site and found some really great articles about web design to which I can relate.

His posts about web design are very easy to read and entertaining most of the time. Check out his article that was featured on Digg, 12 ways to turn your Web 1.0 site into a Web 2.0 site.

The way CodeIgniter keeps you organized is this: It keeps everything separate and in their own folders. Just as you would build a website and have an images, css, and javascripts folder so they are separate from the rest of your website, CodeIgniter takes the extra step and organizes your actual website content. CodeIgniter organizes your projects for you with MVC (Model-View-Controller) programming. Here’s the basic structure for MVC projects:

Models

• Interact with your database and return the retrieved data to the controller.
• These are the files you want to build once and not have to edit them ever again. For example, a blog model would include functions to retrieve blog posts and comments, pages, users, page views, etc.

Controllers

• Your controller will load a model, such as a blog model, to retrieve data such as a blog post. You can manipulate the data however you want here and then pass it on to the view.

Views

• Views are what the visitor actually sees. You want this to contain as little PHP and and styling code as possible. This is for your raw content. Use style sheets to style the content and trim the PHP code as much as possible.

Images

• Store your images in an images folder in the website root folder. If you have trouble calling retrieving images with CodeIgniter read my article on how to stop these headaches.

Javascripts

• Try to attach your javascript functions to the DOM after the page loads in your javascript file. This way, you can keep your javascript functions out of the views that are for your content, and it helps you program your website to be compatible with browsers that aren’t using javascript.

CSS

• Style your page here. Try to stay away from inline styling. This way, search engines and visitors who are using mobile devices will be able to see your page without styling getting in the way.

.htaccess file

• This file, along with your routes.php file in the CodeIgniter config folder, re-routes your URLs to look pretty. This really helps search engines and visitors remember where pages are on your website. You can get rid of URLs with metadata in them. (http://www.thiswebsite.com/index.php?function=how%20to%20get%20rid%20of%20stupid%20long%20URLs)

Voila. Organized Website Project.

I will accept donations via paypal @ daniel@distributorone.com. Just Kidding.

Thanks to CodeIgniter, MooTools, and new knowledge of how Object Oriented Programming is supposed to work, my projects are much more organized, and I can spend more time being productive because of these tools. Thanks for reading!

Say you want to describe a human being with code. You will create a class called Human:

class Human {

}

Now, you want the human to perform a few functions. This is simple also; you create functions within the class to describe the human’s actions.

class Human {

function Eat($food) {

}

function Sleep($time) {

}

}

Now our human can eat and sleep. In PHP, you would create a new human by instantiation. So we can create Bob.

$Bob = new Human();

If we want Bob to eat,

$Bob->Eat($chicken);

Go to sleep, Bob!

$Bob->Sleep($one_hour);

We have just told Bob to eat chicken and sleep for an hour. Pretty easy, eh?

This same principal applies to CodeIgniter for PHP and MooTools for Javascript. They are object oriented, so it is very easy to implement them into youur websites. If you need session handling to password protect certain pages of your website, you just instantiate the session library in CodeIgniter and it will manage user sessions for you. If you need to update a layer on your website dynamically, such filling in the current weather or water temperature (such as this site: www.easylakeliving.com) you can do so simply by calling:

new Ajax('url_to_get_weather', {
method: 'get',
update: $('current_weather')
}).request();

Just by calling Ajax, you are updating the ‘current_weather’ layer on the website with the information provided by the URL ‘url_to_get_weather.’

That’s OOP for ya!

Open up your routes.php file inside the application/config folder in your CI app and add the following line to the end of the routes.php file:

$route['^(?!ezstore|ezsell|login).*'] = “home/$0″;

This line uses a regular expression that means, If a visitor goes to any url EXCEPT ezstore, ezsell, or login, redirect them to the home controller, and the function inside the home controller ($0). This way, every time we call a function from the home controller, such as contact, about_us, services, etc., we can snip home out of the URL and keep our URLs short and pretty.

The end!