With the help of a friend's 56k dial-up modem and Pentium Pro computer, I started on my first website using Geocities. Lots has changed since then, and even more continues to change at fast pace. The web is a constantly evolving medium, which means the more flexible your design is, the better. Making a website has many different facets: making sure the design holds up in different browsers, obtaining good ranking with the popular search engines, delivering content in an engaging way, and most importantly... pulling it all together and making it work.
I enjoy creating highly dynamic and interactive websites using a variety of tools, languages and standards. While I feel at home coding things from scratch in php, mysql, html, css and javascript just using a simple text editor, I also make use of popular frameworks and management systems like WordPress.
HipHopProduction.com is a personal website that I have been running since 2003. It originally started out as a place to host music and lyrics for online competitions. Since then, thanks to constant updates and smart use of SEO, it has evolved into a top search engine result on google, yahoo, bing and other engines, aside from being a valuable resource for a large community of music producers. The site runs off a highly customized WordPress theme, which I also integrated into a custom Simple Machines Forum theme. I commissioned my good friends Hope Krokidas and Andy Koconis of Main Sail Design to come up with the artwork, while I got to play the role of creative director and programmer. After a few months of hard work, revisions and long nights of coding in php, mysql, html and css, I'm very pleased with the result - which is a seamless integration of wordpress and a third-party forum, which loads in all major browsers.
Originally created as a personal tool for finding new music to sample, I eventually wrapped my code in some nice graphics and posted it for public use. Dubbed "SampleDig," this is a flash app that searches online music blogs and RSS feeds for links to files (mp3s, zips, etc.) and presents them in an easy format. It was created with Actionscript 2 using the Flash IDE.
I have been bouncing between wordpress, joomla and expression engine for the past couple years trying to figure out a decent way to integrate a streaming audio player into my forums, without altering the database, or intruding on SMF at all.
Anyways, long story short, I ditched all the “bridges” and just made a non-intrusive package (well, started to make it at least) that feeds data into flash using a series of php functions, that connect directly to the smf database.
I’ve put together a practical example of using this class here:
It will load a given topic (in this case, each drop-down item is associated with a topic that has lots of replies with attachments), search that topic for mp3 attachments, and add them to the list. Then by clicking on any of the names in the list, that user’s mp3 will begin to stream.
The functions that I’ve got working so far are getNews, getMembers, getMemberGroups, getPollEntries, getPoll, getBoards, getBoardCategories, getBoardModerators, getMemberInfo, validateMember, and getTopicAttachments.
Read on for the source code and a functional example. read more...
