Sam Davyson

So what is up next? Well I have a few ideas. At the moment I am exchanging emails with Hotmail staff which (when the issue is resolved) I will publish here. I find it interesting to see these customer service teams in action. Sometimes it is clear that your message hasn’t even been looked at. This doesn’t seem to be the case in general with the Hotmail staff though. So far the support has been top notch although perhaps not super active. More later.

I might do a post about some of the best things about 30 boxes. At the moment it has to be the way you can add RSS content. Anything on your calendar that is RSSified. That is ace. Photos, bookmarks, comments… I want to find a work around for forum posts on this front. If anyone knows a coComment style tool for forums that would be simply brilliant.

I still have a load of reviews left over from the last time I did a post like this. They may come soon. I am going to review Riya as soon as I get in, and Yahoo! Mail Beta again as soon as they let me try it. There is loads of other stuff coming out soon too. Anything that I like will of course be reviewed. If Google build their calendar and it beats 30 boxes then I’ll be the first to say.

There is a lot of buzz about online calendars right now. TechCrunch can’t review them quick enough. I have briefly played with a few of them. The best in my opinion is 30 Boxes. It is so smooth. It is so clever. It is so quick. It is so nice to look at. It is so custom. It is so broad. And it is just so good. Google are just about to enter into this space… There is much talk about this all over the blogosphere. Will it be integrated with Gmail? Will it be good? It better bloody be. It will have to be very good to compete with 30 Boxes.

Riya ‘s CEO announced on the 28th January in a brilliant blog post that Riya Beta was on its way. In the next few weeks. Since then they won a Demo God for their presentation at Demo 06 in early February. We are now a week into March. Five weeks since the initial few weeks statement. Where’s Riya?

I have being trying out a few bits and bobs in the PHP zone of my website. It is all pretty much still under wraps and there are a few products in their that I will probably never openly release. They were just big tests. So far I have made an uploader with different users and profiles to enable fairly open file sharing. This is still fairly basic and is currently password protected as a whole but users files are not individually protected. I wrote the whole thing in PHP as my first real PHP script using loads of tutorial and copying and pasting a bit of script. But it works and it taught me a lot of PHP in the process.

I decided to revamp the whole thing and rather than building on what I had started I started afresh. Building with much more experience. I started by making a user accounts system with PHP / MySQL and made registration, and login forms. I wrote logon and register scripts to go with them, and I made some basic artwork to put on the forms and wrote some CSS to upgrade the appearance of the HTML output. I then had to work out what to put inside. My first gizmo was a “JotBox” which was a simple textarea that allowed the saving of notes and other bits. I wrote a PHP script to allow the saving in the MySQL database in the record corresponding to the user ID. I added session variables to the login system to allow the id to be used in the script. I since upgraded the look of it with a new save button and a message when it has been saved and a JavaScript to revert it back to its previous appearance after a single second.

Next I implemented an uploader into the interface. It was based on my old one but with a better UI and it stored a list of files in a new database and then read them through another snippet of PHP. I used a small piece of JavaScript to make this box feel better too with the show / hide of the upload box. I implemented a level system for users so that I can play around with the latest release of the code (buggy) whilst users can have the safe code until the buggy code becomes safe when I switch the levels and start new developments. I made a few fake users and one real user successfully signed up.

The whole system is not really ready for anything or anyone yet. It is completely unprotected and needs protection before going live. I am going to implement some spam controls: email activation, file limits, .htaccess in file directory etc. in the near future. But for now I am proud of what is my first PHP project.

The newest site on the web that was just registered earlier today is now online and ready for visitors. The site, which is founded and created by a friend of mine Ammar, is hosted at letmehelpyou.org is currently still running through ideas for uses. Not only what to host or offer but how to host or offer it. No doubt though I am sure that something will be thought of soon so add it to your bookmarks, it is a site to keep your eye on. One thing to check out right now is the site blog, there you’ll get all the updates as the site moves forward.