I’m sure you’re asking, “what does this have to do with me”? Well watch the video, and I’m positive you will want to go out and hug someone. Hug someone out of sincerity, love, or just plain friendship, but go hug someone.

Well it’s now 2008 and I now have a nice Dell Laptop that can run this. I’m now playing second life and designing my own house. I’ve tried to make something a few times but it only leads to deletion. Well to start off, I’ve ditched about $48.00 into this game just in linden dollars, not to mention the $22 I’m going to be paying quarterly.

So why am I blogging about SL? Well to tell you the truth, I don’t know, the game is great, I can fly anywhere I want, build what I want, and put my texturing and 3D skills to use. Needless to say, I am starting a store now and hope to have customers soon, but this takes time and I understand that. My plan with SL is to make it yet another project…. yes I know, I already have RM on the back burner sizzling away. I don’t know how to approach something of this magnitude but when I do, I’ll keep you updated.
Thanks for reading

Every new user as of June 18, 2008 will still be considered a subscriber. If you sign up and would like to become an author just send me a message or email on the contact page and I will make you a contributor. Now as a contributor you will only be able to make posts and publish them. I of course will moderate them and any improper posts will be deleted or put on hold. Of course if I see you making great posts I will be upping your status to Author with a slew of new features. Anyhow, if you’re interested just sign up and send me an email.

So my question to you is what if you wanted to do a flash navigation or header for your own template, then you would need to pull the pages data from the database and input it into the Flash file, so quite possibly you could export the database information either into an ActionScript (.as) format or to a flat file (.txt) then input the variables into the flash. Now in my opinion, I wouldn’t want to export all posts to a flat file and then input all that information into a flash file so maybe just the navigation to make animated headers…

NOTE: This is just an idea, not a confirmed feature

As most of you may or may not know, I’ve never coded a full CMS before, so this is new to me. I was browsing around the #php channel on EfNet for a few days and I got a lot of bad responses to me using Smarty and ADOdb. I know Smarty and ADOdb are ‘bloated’ and I know a lot of people publicly state their disliking to one of the two. The point is, I’m the only individual on this project so yea, if I had a team of coders maybe we would make our own DBAL (Database Abstraction Library) and maybe we’d use our own template language also, but I’m the only one on this project.

If you think you can do this better than me or wish to provide your input that I would actually consider then join the project, otherwise if I didn’t ask for it then keep it to yourself.

On a brighter side, possibly more positive outlook, I have almost completed one page, y@y one page of the CMS. Yes it is only one page but there are functions, define() variables, language files, and a few config files involved in this file. I know it’s only the registration page but its now 99% finished. All I have to do now is code the session back side to pull user data and place it into session variables or arrays to use in the site once the user is logged in, and maybe I’ll work on the “keep me logged in” module later since I don’t know where to begin.

What now? Well I guess I’ll start on the front end of things, maybe the index page. You know the standard shit, pulling information from the database. Well to do this, I gotta work on the back end at the same time. Anyhow, anyone got some ideas of what you would like to see on a front page of a portfolio? Would you like it to be modular or editable on the fly? Any ideas?

On the template and styling side of things, Red Mantis will be simple for even the most noob-ish of html coders. Default templates will be coded in xHTML and validated to perfection to ensure cross browser compatibility. Now this goes without saying that others will be able to make their own templates with the ease of simple xHTML and the Smarty Template Engine. Smarty will enable programmers like me to separate the PHP from the template to prevent destruction of the back end code. This also breaks down the template in simple files, maybe even just two, who knows!

My intentions on templates is to give the ability to customize the full site, and any widgets along with the AJAX drag and drop, Lightbox Imaging, GD2 Watermarking, and other standard features that are already incorporated in most online software. The Red Mantis project team will be looking at software that is already released to get a general idea of what people look for and what we consider functional, currently we are looking at the following online applications:

• Wordpress
• Joomla
• phpBB Olympus

We are also currently looking into the following websites for ideas also:

• Big Black Bag
• Carbonmade
• FolioSnap
• Qfolio

There are many other features we look to incorporate into Red Mantis, but we want to work on functionality first, when it works, we’ll add features. The intention is also to let end users write their own plug-ins and simply place them into their own directory for Mantis to recognize.

I know this is boasting a lot of hype here, but just image, what if you had your own software to do what you wanted it to do, and it’s FREE? I mean, you can’t beat that. Now I’m not saying that this software will accommodate everyone’s needs, I just want it to be something that you can see yourself using.

Well Wal-Mart, being the giant they are, steamrolled  over Debbie winning multiple lawsuits and standing by their agreements.  Granted, yes Debbie did sign the agreement and may or may not knew about it.  The point behind the matter is taking money from people who need it.  Now I’ve been a devout Wal-Mart customer for years but this is just ridiculous!!!

Read the full story here >>>

To read the full article please go to my blog on Boonex.com

1. Your going to need to find out if your host allows SSH connections and you’re going to need the following information:
   • Hostname or IP address
   • Port number for connections (22 is default for ssh)
   • Username and Password
2. Now we need an FTP program and an SSH program, luckily for you there’s two great programs that are totally free… oh, you need to know what they are right?
   • SmartFTP
   • Putty - You may just want to download Putty itself, not the extras, but hey it’s up to you.
     
3. Now I’m sure you know the next step… what? You don’t? Well just install the programs, they won’t do it themselves!
4. Now let’s get the programs logged in to save some time. Open putty and input all your information and don’t forget to save it.
   
5. I apologize but I don’t have SmartFTP installed on this desktop, I will add screen shots later. But now you will need to login to smartftp using your FTP information that was given to you by your hosting provider.
6. Since all the easy work is done, you now need to upload the ‘zip’ file to your server with SmartFTP, simply drag and drop it from a folder on your computer to a folder on the SmartFTP application interface. Now watch the dialog box to see when the file upload is done.
7. Now since we haven’t actually logged into Putty yet, let’s do that now, since all the information is entered and ready to go, simply click “Open”.
8. Once ‘Open’ is clicked you will be asked your login information, enter your user name and password. Now you need to get to the directory where you uploaded the zip file via ftp. Don’t know how to navigate in Unix, well that’s why I’m here. Are you familiar with MS-DOS? Remember the cd command (Change Directory) well this is used on Unix also to move around files and folders! So we need to do this, simply type in the following:
   cd path/to/you/folder
9. Once you’re in the folder, you will want to unzip the the file with the following commands:
   unzip -r -v filename.zip
   -r means recursive
   -v means verbose, this should tell you what the program is doing.
   If you have problems, just omit ‘-v’ from the command
10. Now the files are unzipped, you need to delete the zip file:
    rm -r filename.zip

Now you’re files are done, wasn’t that faster than uploading 2,000+ files? Thought so.

What if you need to download a whole website for a clients backup or something, granted download speeds vary between ISP’s but let’s decrease the download time shall we?

1. Once again login to putty and smartFTP
   • NOTE: You don’t have to use smartFTP if your server allows direct file access.
2. When you’re in putty, navigate back to the folder you wish, if you don’t remember how, here’s the cd command
   cd path/to/your/file
   • NOTE: you cannot zip a folder that you are currently in, you will need to be a level above, just type cd .. for that
3. Provided you are on top of the folder or file you wish to zip, just type the following:
   zip -9 -v filename.zip
   • This is quite quick, and I mean quick, took 5 secs for 2,000 files
4. Now you can simply access the file with SmartFTP by dragging and dropping it from smartFTP to your desktop.
   • If your server allows direct file access you can simply type the address to the zip file and download it that way.

Hope this helped ya, if you have any questions or concerns, please leave me a comment.