The joy of code

Sadly I am having way too much fun playing with this site and it's growing very rapidly. I've been working on it for 15 hrs straight!

Members now have stables, can add horses, veiw horses (with pictures) and upload pics! When you write it like that it doesn't sound like much but my cramping thumb from the not so ergonomical code that is PHP begs to differ.

Every page is made up of around 7 pages (not including the links). Every menu is an 'included' page, which while sounds impressive, makes updating everything that much easier. As instead of going back to edit the different pages I can edit one included page and it updates to the whole site! How cool is that!

Playing with varibles is still a bit beyond me, but things are just working even when I didn't think they would. Which is fantastic. I think I must be understanding stuff in my sub-concious, cause I am still scratching my head over some things. If thats even possible?

I'm continously having to stop myself from adding on the fluffy extras now and focus on getting the back bone of the site created first. Although when I get tired I find myself messing with the table layouts and the layout of the code. I have found it nesscary (I can't spell) to make comments next to my if close tags, as to make the site as idiot proof as possible I have been including lots of if and else varibles and all those curly brackets can get confusing. So by adding comments when I need to add another if over the top of the first 20 ifs I can work out where to put that blasted curly bracket so it doesn't pop up an extra error for me to figure out.

I know this means nothing to anyone but me, so how about I add some photos.

Am I the only one who finds it curious that I don't actually participate in photo showing? (Thanks liwi and D'Arry for photos which I just ripped out of a random file for test purposes)

Feeling Ambitious

Things have been very busy on the ND Designs work bench. Model horses have taken a back seat to other creations, whilst still model horse related it's not tangible and shall never be entered into a show ring.

I have been working on something called EMSC, for those who aren't mind readers it's the "Equine Model Showing Central", my first really big project. The idea of this site when I noticed the lack of places for people to host their online photo shows. I don't believe this is a dead art form, but rather one which has been looking for a place to call home. I often see photo shows held on photobucket or webshots, with sucess but the upload and way of doing things appears "clunky" at best and time consuming. In a hope to slime-line this, I started thinking about ways I could improve this (and my coding skills) the result is EMSC.

So what is it? I am hoping to create a central database where clubs, showers and hosts can unite and host all their photos, enter multiple shows over multiple clubs and store all their model horse photos. Entering online photoshows will be easier, as rather then having to upload all photos and information to a new location everytime you try to enter, you can just enter the photo with a click of the button, no waiting for passwords or money to clear it will all be handled by one unified system. People who run clubs can host their own shows, which can be open to the entire group or closed to members of their club. PM's, points systems, leader boards and heaps more. Horses will be able to have multiple photos and the points of the horse will be tallied. Design your own classlists, anyone can create their own classlists, assign a judge(for clubs) or judge it yourself. Presidents can confirm that people are part of their club and members can be part of multiple clubs. Well... eventually.

Before we run the marathon, first I must learn to walk. Today, I took some babysteps in a forward motion with the creation of a login, activation script, log out and register. This is a huge step forward for me, as I have learnt about session ids and how logins work, storing varibles and calling them. I'm really pleased with the foundation I have created and think it will be adequate to carry the site forward whichever direction it goes. It's been great fun (if your a nerd like me) but now the a's and s's are starting to look alike and I keep miss-typing and forgetting all important underscores which is do or die in coding.

However, now we have a login, we can start looking toward the more interesting things like creating user pages and uploads so the site can have purpose, at the moment it's a bit of a road to nowhere. Luckily there isn't any sort of "login limit" as I would have surely broken it with all the testing I do as I go along, to make sure the theory (and spelling) matches the practice. After 22 test accounts, 15 acctivation emails and 27 logins. I declare the login working!

And what's a blog post without sneak-peak photos?

Yeah, it still has a way to go...

Watch this space!