Yesterday it was thursday and I was stuck doing some work but also racing the ‘thursday race’ in LFS as planned. I qualified 10th on the grid on A-division and had a good race until lap 12 when I flipped onto my roof and out of bounds in the chicane. My team mates in Nordic Racing Group (NRG) did alright although Nicke had a potential podium finish in 3rd place when he ran out of petrol in the last corner to finish 5th instead - what a shame.

Tonight I’ve been out in Stockholm for a few pints. We started off in the “Bull and Bear” pub and then I can’t quite remember where we went, but it was a good night and I had quite a laugh with my mates.

Hopefully this weekend will allow me to work more on muisc, games and the new websites.

Today has not been very Imphenzia-oriented due to other commitments. Been to work and the gym and practiced for the Live For Speed race on thursday (it’s a new ‘Thursday Race’ season starting this week). I race for ‘Nordic Racing Group’ that is proudly sponsored by Imphenzia Now, however, I am creating a few copies of Illusion due to some recent orders so I’ll ship them tomorrow. I see it’s already past 1am as well, hopefully I’ll get more time for Imphenzia tomorrow.

Since making music was not to be today - I continued to develop the web sites (I actually did quite a bit earlier today as well). The “my account” page is more or less finished so you can update your details now, reset password, change e-mail address and so forth.

I then found my self redeveloping a feature no less than three times hence the title of this blog entry.

Lost Password?
First I created a feature called “Lost Password” which meant that by clicking this feature and entering your e-mail address you should receive your username and password to your registered e-mail address… Great! Once nearly completing this feature, I realised that since I “encrypt” the passwords in the database using MD5 - I won’t be able to send the password through e-mail as I can’t ever find out what it is, I (and the program) only see 32 hexadecimal characters which is of no use.

Reset Password?
I then reprogrammed this feature and called it “Reset Password” which means that by entering the e-mail address like previously, the password will be reset to a random password and sent to the registered e-mail address… Great! But then someone can just be evil and run about resetting peoples password for no reason, so that was a waste of time.

Confirmed Password Reset!
Now - I am finally creating the final (?) piece of code for this type of function which is a reset password feature but it won’t actually reset the password straight away. Rather it will send an e-mail to the registered user and ask HIM/HER to click on a link that will ask you to enter and confirm a new password.

Obviously the third attempt at this feature is the best one so why I didn’t think of this to begin with is anyones guess.

 I think this function is one of the last “boring” one before I move on to news, about, music pages and so forth. I think there will be plenty of time to develop during this coming week due to the weather being rubbish. We’ve had no snow all winter here and NOW it decides to come? I will also make some music as I have a remix request pending of a track from a girl in NYC - I have to get it sorted asap.

After over a week of solid work put into the new web sites I launched up the sequencer today to see if I could get anywhere with a potential track and all I came up with was this: mp3 file.

Not too happy with that and I’ve learned something over the years, if it doesn’t click straight away and inspiration comes flowing once you start working on a track - just leave it for the time being. It isn’t possible to imagine creativity and it has to come naturally. I’ll close down the sequencer for tonight and head off for the gym. I’ll be listening to some trance during my gym session so maybe I get some ideas there, you never know.

It’s been  a long time since I’ve spent so many hours on something producing such a small visible result. First of all I had to learn all about protecting PHP code and form fields that are inserted into the database when logging in with mysql_real_escape_string and the joys of some servers having magic_quotes_gpc enabled and when stripslashes should and shouldn’t be used. I’ve finally protected the code enough from malicious visitors - I don’t want to end up like the old imphenzia forums once were if you remember those days. Since I already developed the login / logout / remember me features of the new sites yesterday, the 4 hours I spent on just protecting the code was just plain boring - but not wasted as the result is good and I learned something very useful.

Originally I used a javascript called “Live Validation” to verify the contents of form fields as you type in them and the result was quite cool - what it didn’t support, however, was verifying on the fly that a username already existed or if invalid characters were entered. A friend of mine advised me about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and this is something I find very exciting (sadly enough!). What AJAX enabled me to do (amongst a million other things) is to verify if a username exists in the database as a user is typing into the form field. If the user enters a username while registering that already exists, the web page will warn you that the name is taken - this all without submitting the form or using the tedious back button etc. Now then you might think - why waste so much time on learning this stuff as I may never have a huge amount of registered users on imphenzia.com - but my reply is that learning this stuff is extremely useful as fast and intelligent websites is the future.

I found out that when troubleshooting javascripts, FireFox with the extension ‘firebug‘ is very useful for debugging when things go wrong. Firebug will display error messages and scripts neatly and in my case the AJAX feed that is returned. At the same time, I must admit that I very much prefer IE as a browser - mainly because it renders web pages much nicer and - and also because so many sites look incorrect in FireFox… and if you are a true FireFox fan you will probably explode now and say that all these sites look horrible because they were incorrectly developed, the fact is that they still look horrible regardless of who’s fault it is hence me prefering IE

Well, I still have some work left to do with the validation method tomorrow and the easter weekend is nearly over. Once validation is finally taken care of I can move on to more fun stuff on the site such as the music section.

Just a quick note… Continued work on the sites today - mainly added cookie support for persistend logins on the new site. Also started the “my account” page where you’ll be able to list your game keys and handle subscriptions etc. Only got a few hours in today as I watched quite a few episodes of Prison Break with my wife and enjoyed some time off with it being easter and all.

I’ve completed the theme functionality on the new site. Changing the look (and width) of the site is extremely easy and fast. The screenshots that you can see demonstrate this functionality although changes to templates are only minor for testing - in the end result the themes will be quite different from each other.

In addition to themes I’ve completed a user registration process with live java validation of the form fields as you type. This will simplify the process making sure that your passwords match up and that your address is valid etc. The registration process also features validation by e-mail to ensure you don’t get unsolicited spam.

 Finally - the most important thing I’ve learned so far is KEEP YOUR CONTENT AND DESIGN SEPARATED. This is the best way to work as changing a theme or page content is super simple once the framework is in place. It’s 4:14am now so I’m going to eat something and watch some TV now… then off to sleep.

The new music site is till taking shape utilizing reusable CSS a reusable style sheet and I am happy how it resizes between 960px and 760 pixels. I am also planning cross functionality between the different sites (especially music and games) so you can see the latest news from the other site on the side bar, use the same account to log in with personal settings etc. Another feature I am planning is a template selector so if you thnik the site is too dark or just fancy a different font/colour scheme, you can simply select another one and the site will remember this for your next visit.

Even though progress is slow, I’m glad to finally be learning this stuff as I’m probably a few years behind when it comes to web-fashion

 Today I put yet another couple of hours into the new web sites and I am getting some inspiration from the look of this blog. The new sites will be quite modular and should feature some functionality that is shared between the music and the games section and I am quite excited about the whole project.

 I am also happy to say that I’m going for the commonly suggested method layout by best practice which is a max fixed width of 960 pixels that allows resizing down to a minimum of 760 pixels. This should look best in higher resolutions but also allow those with lower resolution to enjoy the site (I feel it is important not to neglect any of fellow fans!)

 There is nothing new to show and it will probably be quite a while until then, but I will continue to work on this when time allows.

Today I’ve spent a good few hours getting more comfortable with CSS and I must say it is a huge step forward compared to only using HTML as it is extremely easy to keep consistency in the design and position different elements. At the same time as I am learning CSS I am converting from ASP to PHP. I can produce ASP code much faster, but PHP has a much better array of commands and functions and is also widely used on both Linux and Windows web-hotels so you don’t have to restrict yourself if it were to be necessary to move.

I have high hopes for the new web pages and it’s fun to mess about with! Due to having many interests I am fortunate enough that my interest does a “round robin” and at the moment it’s web design that I’m enjoying, a couple of weeks back it was all about music and releasing “Illusion” and in a week or two I’ll probably be programming away with Performa Cars.