It’s been more than a decade since I last wrote any C++ code, and I’m feeling nostalgic about it. I have also always wanted to build a game server, so today I made the daring decision to scratch both itches. I want the server to support all kinds of games: single player, two player, multiplayer,…
Well, the Random Article Widget inspired me somehow… Let’s say that we wanted a “Did you know that…” teaser to appear in the widget instead of an excerpt. Let’s say, for example, that we had an article about the grey whale. Our widget could show a trivia phrase such as: Did you know that the…
The last time it was a shortcode. Now it’s a widget. It will display the first few words of a randomly selected post along with its title and a link to the article itself. Here’s the code, and we’ll discuss it afterwards: Constructing a widget is a two-step procedure: defining it and registering it. To…
Browsing an old code repository of mine, I bumped into this little listing. It was my attempt to experiment on javascript object constructors and prototypes. It was a chilly winter evening, just like tonight, so I thought I’d make some divs snow… I figured, every snowflake should be an object, visualized by a little div…
I was intrigued by this topic in freestuff.gr (in Greek) to write this article. The question is to develop a web page that will handle an events database. Although this is pretty simple by itself, issues arise when we want to attach a set of files to each event. For simplicity’s sake, we will assume…
Comments is a common feature of all programming languages. Apart from their obvious original purpose, they offer coders another ability: They can temporarily deactivate a piece of code by commenting it out, rather than completely deleting it. Why shouldn’t authors have the same ability? Why shouldn’t they be able to deactivate a piece of content,…
In a prevous article demonstrating the development of a JQuery chat, I noted that several server-side aspects depended on the specific implementation. I thought, however, I would provide a sample chat_aux.php for the demonstration to be complete. Of course, in real-life scenarios, things would certainly be a lot more complicated than this. So let’s begin…
From my Delphi days, I remember one of its most interesting features: The TDataset class. It was an abstract class used to implement data access from various data sources, including but not limited to databases. One had to derive a TDataset descendant, by implementing its abstract methods, in order to specify the access details of…
Since its babysteps, the World Wide Web (WWW) adopted the URL concept in order to provide a locating mechanism for its vast resources. In most cases, after the scheme (or protocol) part is recognized by the agent, a nameserver is used to resolve the domain part, and then, the request is sent to the appropriate…
As much as I resented the fact that I had to learn yet another framework, there came a time when I couldn’t avoid JQuery any more. Then, in order to get a hands-on experience with it, I decided to build a simple web-based chat. The concept is fairly simple: The server keeps track of a…