Archive for the ‘community site building’ Category

Create a restricted area on your website

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

If your website is running on an Apache server, its very easy to restrict access to a folder to only yourself or a select few people. This is very useful if parts of your site are not yet fully operational, or if you want to run a small “beta”. (more…)

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How to ban people from your site by IP address

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I found this neat trick the other day… If you notice someone is trying to hack your website, or just would rather a certain individual not stop by anymore, its very easy to ban the offender if you’re using Apache as your webserver. (more…)

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A chat with a professional designer

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

If you are, work with or want to be a professional designer, you MUST READ THIS…

I had a chat with MD, a professional designer friend of mine. I wanted to get an idea of what his design process is, as well as his thoughts on the current “Web 2.0″ situation and what it means for professional designers right now. He graciously agreed to allow me to post the conversation to the blog!

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New updates to iswapyou.com

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Theres been a lot of new functional changes made to iswapyou in the last two weeks. Summary is listed below.

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Why should my site use a database? Dynamic Data for Web 2.0

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Databases run just about everything on the web, from ebay to the latest social networking site. Any site that generates a lot of content and updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis should use some sort of online database. There is a reason that most blogs use either a “flat file” database (i.e. MoveableType), or a commercial or open source database application (i.e. WordPress - which this blog uses). Databases store your data so you can output and shape it based on the function that your sites user wishes to perform. This is the meaning of “dynamic data”, the benefits of which i will describe below.

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Create the next Youtube clone

Monday, August 20th, 2007

Howtoforge.com posted a great article yesterday on creating a Youtube-like streaming video site using Debian linux running lighttpd as the web server and FlowPlayer to play the flash-encoded videos…

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Finally - updates to iswapyou.com!!

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

I completed a lot of updates that were in the works on iswapyou.com today. The site search was updated to make it easier to use - instead of having multiple options on it, it now searches and gives results for everything. I changed it on the advice of a few usability experts.

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Integrating phpBB in to a community site - part 2

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Whenever i create a website, i like to try my best to create a consistent look and feel for the entire site as much as possible. If you change UI elements such as navigation links when you go to an installed web application on your site you WILL confuse your users.

That said, it isn’t always practical to shoehorn your entire main site design in to an application without downgrading that applications functionality. With phpBB for example, if I wanted to use the Iswapyou main site design I would need to have two navigation bars (the main site nav and phpBB’s nav) on every phpBB page. This would take up too much space on the page and introduce more clutter than i wanted to, so I instead put my iswapyou main sites navigation links into phpBB’s navigation bar.

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Cracking YouTube, part 3

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Response to my previous two posts about Cracking YouTube has been amazing . Thanks to everyone in the community for the amazingly intelligent discussion that this has spawned, and for all of the high quality responses/comments to the original posts! Keep it up guys, it helps me tremendously and allows me to write more interesting articles like this.

No one has contacted me yet indicating that the technique in part 2 should NOT work by pointing out a hole in the logic. This makes sense, because…

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