Every time I make a new website with a user registration, I usually end up using a reCaptcha somewhere in the process. A while ago, I discovered a reCaptcha library on the Codeigniter forums. And since then, Ive modified it a little bit to work with Codeigniter 2.0 and have placed it on Github where everyone can access it. Below is just an example of the Controller (included in the repository) so you can see how it all comes together.

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So after putting a few months of work into it, I have finally launched ClientMeetFreelancer.com. In short, Client Meet Freelancer is a site dedicated to bringing freelancers and potential clients together without the fees and hassles of other freelancer job boards. I decided to take an Agile/Lean approach to it and have launched it with the minimum features I thought were necessary for the site to get off the ground and still be very useful. Other features will be coming along the way, so stay tuned to the blog for other updates and features that are coming in the near future.

Initial Idea

Ive been doing freelance and contract work for the past two years or so, and one thing that I found tough at the start(every other freelancer will probably agree with me here) was finding clients. Freelancing was something that I was doing on the side to my regular job while in high school. ... [More]

When it comes to web application performance, often times your database will be the largest bottleneck and can really slow you down. So how can you speed up performance when you have a site or application that is constantly hitting your database to either write new data or to fetch stored data? One of the easiest ways is to cache the data that is accessed the most. Today, I cam going to show you a brief example of how to do this with Memcached using PHP and the Codeigniter framework. First off, what exactly is Memcached? "Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering." Basically Memcached is a distributed system that dumps key value pairs to RAM for super fast access. If you need to scale, all you do is add more RAM or more nodes with more RAM. Lets get started.

First, we need to install ... [More]

When it comes to scaling a web application, one of the easiest ways to boost performance is with an asynchronous queue. Since web apps have started to become as complex as native desktop applications, users are expecting them to perform like such. This is where using asynchronous queues comes in to play. Typically with high traffic sites like Facebook, digg, twitter, et al, not everything needs to happen instantaneously, it just needs to look like it. For example, when you choose to send a message to someone on facebook, chances when you click that "send message" button, facebook takes your message and shoves it in a queue of other messages to be processed. To you the user, it looks like its already been sent, but in reality there might be a little bit of a delay. This makes it so that facebook doesnt have to handle sending thousands of messages per minute when you immediately click that button. Granted this is just a hypothetical example, I honestly have no idea how they actually han... [More]

Search Engine Optimization is an interesting topic since it seems that everyone and their brother has a different idea on how it actually works. Today I hope to demystify some of the ideas around SEO and show you some ideas that have worked for me in the past and even some other techniques that are rather effective.

One of the first things that people immediately want with a website is having it on the front page of Google. I mean, who wouldnt want that? With Google dominating the search engine market, its definitely a good place to be. But how exactly do you get there? Well firstly, things have changed since the days of Netscape and needing those meta tags in your websites header. If you want to go real basic there are a few things that you can do (that you should be doing anyway).


The title tag in your header is a pretty important. Google really likes titles, and uses them to differentiate each of your... [More]

Barcamp Rochester 5 is fast approaching, scheduled for April 3rd, 2010. This year is gonna be just as awesome if not more awesome than last year. We are currently in the planning process and are making great progress to bring you an event that you will never forget that will make you come back for more next year.

I recently had the pleasure to redesign the the Barcamp website, bringing us away from the rather confusing wiki format, hoping that it will make it easier for users to network with each other. The main goal behind the redesign was to give Barcamp Rochester a more professional look while making it really easy for users to post their presentations for others to see. One of the major features in the redesign is the ability to upload presentation materials right to your profile page for others to see and download. You are also able to customize your profile page directly with (limited) ... [More]

All this time, Ive been creating libraries for Codeigniter and talking about its features and whats so awesome about it, but Ive never actually explained what Codeigniter is. So some of you might be looking at the GCal Library I wrote and be like "what the hell is this guy talking about??". So Ive decided that I should probably do a mini series of blog posts, introducing the Codeigniter Framework and even do a couple of tutorials on how to start developing with it.

First of, what is Codeigniter? To quote the Codeigniter website, "Codeigniter is an Open Source Web Application Framework that helps you write kick-ass PHP programs". In short, Codeigniter is a framework, or toolkit, that allows you to rapidly develop projects and applications, and basically makes it so that you dont need to write your own library to interact with a database, or to create html templates, or basically reinvent the wheel, allowing you to focus on what your product will be doing, and not on how much co... [More]

Back a few years ago I decided that I wanted to set up my very own web server so that I could do your typical web stuff. Granted this was before the days of twitter, Facebook, and before everyone started releasing API's for their applications, so the web was a simpler place. Well back then I knew nothing of Linux let alone how to use a terminal to get anything done, and there was no definitive guide for installing a web server on a dedicated machine. So that's what I hope to solve. So today we will be installing a full LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server from scratch using Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server Edition. Im not going to walk you through that install simply because it's so simple a monkey could do it. But I will mention that when you get to the bit about selecting packages/services to install DO NOT SELECT ANY. We will be installing everything by hand not only for the experience but because managing software with aptitud... [More]

When it comes to application development, Apple makes it vary difficult (well, not difficult, but rather costly) for you to even load your own applications that you have written on your iPhone. In order to even load them on your iPhone, Apple makes you buy their $99 Developer Package. The Developer Package allows you to put the apps that you have written on your iPhone and up to 20 (I think?) other iPhones for testing. Having the developer package also allows you to put your app on the iTunes App store for downloading and purchasing. But if you are a Computer Science major like I am and like to write applications for your own projects, you're not going to want to put those up on the app store, and you're not going to want to spend $99 just to "officially sign" your apps just to test them out. So What Im going to do is walk you through how to sign your own application so that you can actually get it to run on your iPhone as if you downloaded it from the app store.

First lets s... [More]

Being Thanksgiving break and all, I figured Id work on my CMS a little more and add in some features. One of the features that Ive been thinking of implementing has been one that tweets your blog post when you publish it. Being that twitter limits you to 140 characters and my URL's are rather long, I figured Id make a mini Codeigniter library for URL shortening. I started out by checking out the two more popular services, Bit.ly and TinyURL. As it turns out, TinyURL is just a simple cURL call away for shortening a URL, so for simplicities sake, I went with that one. All you do is drop the file into your System/Application/Libraries directory and make one call, passing the URL you want shortened to it.





Source on Github ... [More]