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!

Assignment 002: "Invite Friend"

I'm on a roll now!! Once I get started I just can't seem to stop until I've finished.
So today I have been creating the system so that you can invite a friend to join the social network, as you can only be invited and you can only view the site if you are a member, which in todays world seems to be a good idea.

At first look the idea seems easy; sending an email which you can input the message, and sending, however there is a lot more to it. On closer inspection you have to enter the email address of who's sending the invite, which may mean disclosing certain personal information that you may not want to. I wanted to be able to send a pre-defined hidden subject and message which also inputs the name and email address of the person sending it.

After a bit of searching and a lot of cut, copy and paste I was able to produce exactly what I wanted. I created the actual page in which you were able to enter the email address of the person to be invited. After clicking on send it then sent an email, which was hidden and contained the name and email of the person sending it, with a link telling them where to register for their account. I also defined a prototype email address and an example subject, which makes the invite look more professional and realistic.

Assignment 002: "Click To Send"

After getting the login system working on my site I set about how to create public and private messages. First I created the database to hold all the information for the public message system, cleverly titled 'public_message'. Then by using a simple send and receive tutorial, alongside a little javascript [which, if I'm honest, didn't understand] and with the examples we used for the CD database I used a month or so ago I was able to create the public message system which would [eventually] be shown on every persons profile. The hard part which I've missed for now is trying to get who the message is from to show the persons name rather then the member ID or member email.

When it came to the private messages I created a separate table, again cleverly titled 'private_message'. I used the same coding as the public message system, but I changed it so that it only showed messages for the user who was logged in, which is found by querying the session of the web page. Again I had the same problem with who it was from.

Thats one more down, and a lot more to go.

Assignment 002: "Wrong Email or Password"

Just completed the [basic] design for my login system and got it working, just. So that's one of about thirty things completed. Its amazing that if you forget one space, and put an upper case letter instead of a lower case one the whole thing doesn't work.

Assignment 002: Inital Design

After explaining to my friends about this terms project and how I have to create a social network, they were more then happy to help me with the name choosing. Half a dozen pints later we came up with the name 'iPlanet'. Initially I wanted something to tie together both MySpace and Facebook, and to also steal some ideas from my friends work in progress 'yourwURLd'. But after a long list the only good one was MyBook, which sounded like the latest product from Apple. Which gave me a brainwave, iPlanet could be the latest of creations from Apple. Genius!

With this in mind the latest will be based on the Apple site.

I'm expecting the cheque in the post soon.