This week during my week of work experience I was given the task of creating an application for mapping crimes in Dublin. So here I am sharing with you what I learnt. We’ll create a simple application that loads points from a database and shows them on a map. Using Javascript, PHP, MySQL and CodeIgniter, I’ll assume you have a webserver running and understand PHP and MySQL.

Note: I think I may have mixed up longitude and latitude throughout the tutorial. It’ll still work, they’re just labeled incorrectly Read More …

Stikked is my ‘other’ website and this weekend under went some big updates. Stikked is a pastebin, a place for developers to collaboratively solve coding problems. Most often used to paste code in a chat environment where it is considered bad etiquette to paste code directly into the chat, instead you paste it onto a pastebin site, then paste the link into the chat.

This weekend paste replies was added, a long time missing feature. Allowing you to reply to another paste for example to correct a problem in the original paste. Paste downloading was also added, still a little buggy though.

Now, if you know what a pastebin is… You’re saying why yet another pastebin? Well firstly pastebins are in general u-g-l-y with exceptions (http://pastie.org/). So I think I fixed that. Pastebins are also kinda feature lacking, sure it’s a pastebin, but I felt you could do a lot more. So Stikked has a few nice features like snip-url creation, auto-copying the link to your clipboard, remembering settings, etc. The really cool stuff is yet to come.

The final reason I made Stikked is: all open-source pastebins were awful and there was no decent open-source CodeIgniter (CodeIgniter being the framework which powers stikked) application from which others could learn. So Stikked is 100% open-source available from Google Code included with developer documentation to help you understand how everything works and get you started with CodeIgniter. On The Stikked Blog we will also be doing a series of tutorials on how we built stikked.

So check it out at www.stikked.com!

While working on the HiPPstr comments, I didn’t understand why other sites required you to go to another page to submit a comment, maybe to prevent over submission, Well I went ahead with it anyway.

I settled on JQuery for my Javascript Framework, it seemed to do a lot out of the box, with lots of plugins and a big community, also the base distribution was a lot smaller than other tools such as MooTools.

I had never done any Ajax Before so this was a little bit of an adventure. If you don’t know ajax is really just a buzz word it stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, it’s a very commonly used technology in web 2.0 web applications, which allows actions and http requests to be done without requiring the page to be reloaded. This gives web applications more of a desktop feel.

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