Blog

… and getting better

I am making good progress. I have the Skyline area map fully working, and the ad-picking Javascript routines turned out pretty slick. They need some minor tweaking, but I’ll get to that later. I intend to make this site fully browser agnostic, so I’m having all sorts of fun dealing with the cross-browser issues. Mostly, I need to abandon my reliance on Microsoft DHTML extensions and IE programming shortcuts, which come in handy in enterprise settings, but not here! I am targeting IE 5.5+, Opera 8.x, and Firefox 1.x, but since I don’t own an Apple, I can’t test Safari.

Using PHP is turning out to be fairly smooth. I can use a lot of my ASP techniques, but with some added twists. For example, there is interesting built-in MySQL functionality, and a variety of ways to assemble text strings and write to the page. After seeing the kinds of traffic spikes experienced by the Million Dollar Home Page, I am mindful of writing efficient code, although that will probably evolve as I learn more about how this platform actually works. I wonder if there is any kind of execution tracing capability, like .Net has, to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Something to research later - I’ve got a site to launch!

My focus now is on getting the ad-buying process mapped out and working. I also need to start doing research on how to use PayPal.