Hey there, today I though I would start a new section on here so I can talk about the projects I'm working on.

There are 3 projects I'm working on at this point on time. In no order I'll start with:-

I'm merging these two sites together, and I'm going to be using Joomla as the CMS, with components to allow downloads (I'm using Docman) and anything else I need. Moving the Gallery is the next major job, as I'm moving from version 1 to version 2.

Tech Haven Network http://www.techhaven.org

The Tech Haven Network is a news site for Neocron with it's own forums and a custom Rares Database written by myself. Now you are probably not a Neocron player and you are wondering what use a Rares Database is. In Neocron some weapon are made of rare parts. These parts are dropped by certain mobs, but the drop them as unidentified rare parts. You then need a researcher to identify the parts, so over time you build up a collection of parts, but since there are about 50 weapons and each weapons and each need between 5-7 different parts. So knowing what you have is a little hard to track, and that's where the Rares database comes in.

I'll confess I'm not the only person who has done a Rares DB, as my version came about when I heard Tricin was stopping his. Understandably he didn't want to let anyone host his code elsewhere, so I stepped in and wrote a new one from scratch in a weekend. Since the first version, I've been adding new features to it.

Currently I'm enhancing some of the features, like adding AJAX support, and adding a new search function. Release is due the end of August.

Fantasy Formula 1 Grand Prix - http://www.ff1gp.com

This has been a pet project of mine for a long time, ever since 1997. The game is quite simple. You pick 2 Formula One drivers and 2 Formula 1 Teams, and they score points depending on how they do in the race weekend.

In 1997 I started a office version on a Excel spreadsheet, before it moved to a Access 2 database.

In 1998 it had moved to a Access 97 database, and I was also at University. There I looked into Perl and CGI scripting, and I hit on the idea of doing a online version, which was a success.

In 1999 the website improved a little but it was still a case of passing txt files between the server and my PC using Access 97 and using Perl to display the data.

In 2000, there was a big update. The calculations for the scores was done using a custom application written in Delphi with Paradox tables. As for the website, that was written in PHP version 3. It still used txt files to hold the data on the server.

In 2001, the website moved from my computing society website to a new co-lo server, where it is today. It had a new domain name http://www.ff1gp.com The database backend also changed to MySQL, but the updating was done on a local server by pulling a database dump off the main server, updating it, and dumping it back. I could have done it using a SSH tunnel to the MySQL server, but on a 56k modem, and a inefficient calculation program (It just bang out lots of SQL queries) it was too slow.

In 2002 the site didn't change that much, but at the end of the 2002 I had a broadband connection so I could use the calculation application and a SSH tunnel, which saved on the database dumping, but the calculation application was still slow.

Come 2003 I did a rewrite of the application to separate the presentation from the business logic and database layer. I also moved the calculation from the Delphi application to a Perl script located on the server. Just as well as I did as the number of teams rocketed.

The years 2004 to 2006 have only been updates to the presentation and the rules, so it's largely the same code from 2003, but it's starting to show it's age, both in design and coding methods.

Now I've started work on the 2007 website, which is a re-write from scratch. There is a new framework going in, to support AJAX, and mobile browsers. It may be a PHP5.1 code base as well, but to run PHP4 and PHP5 on the same webserver is a tricky challenge. The database design is also changing as well, as the design is based on the 2000 design which suited txt files, rather than relational databases.

Boy am I a busy person...