Jotlab » html http://www.jotlab.com Just another WordPress site Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:15:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 CakePHP URL Shortener Service Tutorial http://www.jotlab.com/2009/cakephp-url-shortener-service-tutorial http://www.jotlab.com/2009/cakephp-url-shortener-service-tutorial#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:06:55 +0000 voidet http://www.jotlab.com/?p=4108 [+]]]> If you have just woken up from a 10 year long coma, you might realise that the internet has been dumbed down to 140 characters and services that offer “URL Shortening” are quite widely used. Well today, coma awakened or not, I will be writing out a basic tutorial which will give you an understanding of just how to create a service like bit.ly or owl.ly to shorten URLs so you can insert them to fit within your 140 chars max tweets.

In this tutorial I will be creating this website using CakePHP 1.2.4, because it rocks, and you will think it rocks too if you haven’t used it yet! If you are unfamiliar with CakePHP please jump into it now by checking out either of these two books: Beginning CakePHP by Apress & Free CakePHP Book by Matt Curry! So let’s begin!

Now this isn’t going to be a tutorial into all the joys and wonders of CakePHP. There are simply too many to list, my database wouldn’t be able to hold so much information. However if you are new to CakePHP, all that this tutorial requires is that you have successfully set up CakePHP, wherever you may prefer. There are plenty of tutorials and guides on how to get CakePHP set up on the web. I did a quick search and found this one to be quite good, but there are plenty more out there. The most common newbie gotcha I find is making sure the .htaccess files are uploaded correctly. But with all that said and done! Let’s get going with our URL shortening website!

Final Source Files: app.tar.gz
Images & CSS: imagescss.tar.gz
Demo: http://jotlab.com/tutorials/url/

*please note that the random string generation will lead to collisions. This is a beginner to intermediate level tutorial, so teaching about base converting is out of the question! Well for me!*

]]> http://www.jotlab.com/2009/cakephp-url-shortener-service-tutorial/feed 22 Tutorial: How to build a poll system with PHP and mySQL http://www.jotlab.com/2008/tutorial-how-to-build-a-poll-system-in-php-and-mysql http://www.jotlab.com/2008/tutorial-how-to-build-a-poll-system-in-php-and-mysql#comments Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:03:21 +0000 voidet http://www.jotlab.com/?p=1018 [+]]]> If you have been doing the other tutorials on this site you will notice that I have been teaching PHP and mySQL through projects. Projects that you can slot into your website, or if you are building a project, code that you can use within your project. I start from the ground up, assuming you have no prior knowledge of the topic. So today, we will be building a Poll System using PHP and mySQL. Polls are great for getting user feedback from your site visitors.

The poll system we will be using today will read and store from a mySQL database. mySQL is an extremely fast, efficient and stable database tool. Our poll system will read the questions stored in the database, then display the options to the users, then when a user selects an option and clicks submit, that selection will be stored in the database whereby results will be further calculated from this pool of results. The tutorial today will teach you PHP, not the database construction side of things. If you are interested in the mySQL side of it, just load up phpmyadmin and look at the database design I have made for the tutorial. I will however provide you with the database design which you can just import, which I will describe how to do. Anyway, lets get started.

But first of all check out my site if you’re interested in custom decals! Designed by you made by us! www.wedecal.com!

Source: poll.zip
Demo: http://www.jotlab.com/tutorials/poll/index.php

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