£5, Bargin!

Just a quick note for all the web designers to say that if you don't know about these books already then you should. I came across a few books by publishing company Taschen last year in Fopp, based around websites and how they were created [the books being called Web Design: Flash Sites, and Web Design: Portfolios].

I then found a few more yesterday in Zavvi [these being Web Design: Music Sites, and Web Design: Studios]. For a tiny £5 each for a hundred or so pages or sheer excellence in Web Design these books are amazing. Granted they are no tutorials, but with looks of pictures and quite a fair bit of information these are worth the money. Go grab one now!

Assignment 002: Completion

After everything, I finally handed in my social networking site. Overall I am very pleased with what I have accomplished, it was an experience to be given such a, complicated, yet very interesting project that opened my eyes as to what can be done with web design and how easy it can be.

However there were a few things that I had missed out. I didn't complete the CSS coding fully and I still had a slight problem with the navigation when it came to resizing the browser.

All in all I know I could have done better but given the time scale I am happy with the outcome, until I have my project meeting next week...

Assignment 002: "profile.php"

Now, with this been a social network I had to think about how to create individual profile pages. After looking at todays social sites I found that they each had there own unique way of showing user profiles.

Facebook seems to use the Member ID to create individual profile pages.



Myspace seems to use a unique URL defined by the user for the profile page.



With this in mind, and after speaking to Dave about how simple it was to create the Facebook style page I have opted to query the member ID. In order to create the profile page I have to enter the code on the pages that link to the profile page. As I queried the member ID to get the member name to show the member profile I reversed the code to retrieve the member ID and created the profile page by entering the query into the profile URL. Below is the code for the link to the user profile.

'http://servernamehere/iplanet/profile.php?member_id="{$row['member_id']}'

The above code then comes into play when loading up the information to show the individual profiles. By using the GET code I retrieve the member id from the URL and again, by using MySQL, query the database to load and show all information with the member id from the URL.

Simple, now that I've done it!