For those of you who visit here once in a while I apologize for not making any new posts lately. To be honest I haven’t spent that much time at a computer over the past month or so (mainly just when I’m in university) so I’m a little behind with everything.

Yesterday I spent a few hours getting a couple of things done, one of which is the start to a FaceBook application. Although I’ve had a little play with FaceBook apps in the past I haven’t actually completed one so I thought why not give it a real attempt. The application which I am making is very simple - it will be used as a means to share text based data between users. This data could be a story or poem you’ve written, a piece of code, or perhaps just a couple lines about what you’ve been up to over the last few days.

It’s not a huge application so it’s not going to take me long. Hopefully I should have it finished in a week or so (I know, it’s a lot longer than it should take but I have other stuff to take care of first). Continue reading »

I made my decision to go to university before I started college, just like quite a few other people I suppose. I had a plan to get through college, get my degree and then go off into the ‘big world’ of computing. Well so far it’s going good! This year I completed my two year college course with the final grade of three distinctions (out of a possible three) and as of the 1st of October I will be studying at the University of Glamorgan.

The course is a BSC honors degree in software engineering which spans over the next three years. I enrolled on the 25th (a couple of days ago) and am just waiting now for my first day. All is going well but I am a little unsure about something - I’ve had a look at a list which had all the names of the people studing a computer based course along with their course title. From what I can see there is only me and two other people taking the software engineering course. This is fine but I’m just a little surprised that there is so few of us.

So that’s about it for now. Will keep you updated (if anyone is at all interested that is - which I kind of doubt :p)

Nobody’s perfect and as a web designer/coder myself I don’t claim to be a professional or anything close to that. But there has been a few times where people have given me code to work on or to look over and there have been some really annoying things which are easily avoidable.

So here is just a small list of some of the things which can quite easily annoy a coder and have annoyed me in the past on many occasions.

1. 1,000+ lines of un-commented code
   - Im sure this is quite a common issue and most probably almost every coder will come across it at some stage. Too often have I been involved in scripts which have consisted of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lines of code without a single comment to explain what it does. This usually tends to be the case when the original creator no longer works or supports the script and has therefore left it for someone else to take on. Because he/she was the original creator and did not pass on any hand-written notes he/she may have had (if any) then he/she is the only person who knows what the heck the code is doing. Yes it is possible to figure it all out but that can take hours and hours depending on the size/complexity of the script.

Continue reading »

Yes that is my name, Michael Morgan. The reason behind me doing this post is quite simple.

In search results for “Michael Morgan” in Google and Yahoo not a single result is to do with me - not in the first few pages at least. What I want to do is be the number 1 position for searching for “Michael Morgan”. If you’re wondering why then I don’t really know. I suppose it would just be pretty cool to come up as position one for my name. Also it gives me a chance to test out my SEO skills :p.

I’m not going to make any drastic changes to this blog to rank higher for the term “Michael Morgan” but will instead use incoming links to do the majority of the work. I may make a few minor adjustments throughout the blog to increase keyword density but that’s about it.

Lets see how it goes.

In the last few years online social networks such as MySpace, Friendster etc have really kicked off and have become widely used all over the world. Currently there are a few hundred million users of social network sites (my guess based on member stats I have heard about leading sites) so it’s obviously a huge thing. But in the last month or two it has really amazed me as to how far these sites have spread and are really now becoming a part of our daily lives.

Here are just a few examples. To begin with about 8/9 weeks ago I was in Tesco picking up something to eat and whilst queuing at the counter I over heard a conversation. It was between two members of staff and they were talking about MySpace. Basically they were asking for each other user names so they could be friends online. I didn’t really take too much notice of this though so didn’t really think about it.

The second time was not long after, I think just a few days when my sister (who is not a big user when it comes to computers) asked me if I wanted to be her friend on MySpace Continue reading »

That’s right. I finally have a car!

Ive been waiting for this day for quite a while now and now that it’s here it’s great! The car is a Vauxhall Corsa, 99 plate (V reg), 3 door. I’ve been driving it around most of the day - going to places I don’t really need to be. The insurance for it is also considerably cheaper than what I had budgeted for which is great - more money to waste on other things.

For now I only have one photo of it but will try and add some more when and as I can. For updates keep an eye on the gallery.

The last few days I’ve had a break from working on Sokial; had to get some other things sorted first. But prior to that I really dug in to the core of the code and have made quite a few changes to how I originally planned it. The code is now ‘module’ based if you like; meaning that every (well most) feature/element of the sites functionality can be enabled/disabled as required. Doing this means I have much more control over the code so if there are ever any problems (I’m sure there will be a few bugs) I can get it sorted as quick as possible. The new code also makes use of a nice templating system to output everything to the browser so the design could in theory be changed in a matter of days (if I worked in it full on) without any real hassle.

I’m also going to be implementing some pretty advanced customization options for the users profile. Again I’m not giving too much away right now but they are pretty cool.

I would like to thank all of those who have entered their email address Continue reading »