For a while now I have been using a basic FTP system called Surreal CMS, this service connects via FTP to your web host pulls the page you want to edit down and then allows you to edit it, when you done it saves it back to the FTP server. For basic sites this type of thing is great as there is nothing to install and you can be up and running really quickly.
About a month ago I needed to setup about a dozen single page websites, I was after something simple so I turned to Surreal CMS again. For this project I wanted to be able to customise the branding on the interface, Surreal CMS does offer this but their pricing structure was a little steep for what I wanted to use it for. With this in mind I decided to create my own system.
It took a week to develop but I came up with a simple, easy to use FTP based CMS system which I called FTP-CMS.
The system is built in PHP using the CodeIgniter framework; PHP has built in functions for interacting with FTP servers so it was easy to connect and download and upload pages from the server.
When the page has been downloaded from the server I run it through the PHP Simple HTML Dom Parser which does a fantastic job of locating the editable areas of the page, these areas can then be edited by the end user using the CKEditor.
After I built and tested this system I decided to turn it into a web service and make it available to everybody, this stage took a couple of weeks primarily because I had never dealt with recurring payments before and I wanted to make sure everything was going to work correctly.
The service called FTP-CMS is now available for anyone to use but unlike the few other similar services this one has a very different pricing structure.
I am charging £1 per site per month, this means if you only want to manage one or two sites its a lot cheaper than anything else. For £1 a month you get full access to the branding features so the end users who use the service wont ever come across the FTP-CMS name only the generic content-cms.com domain and site.
The service has a 1 week free trial available to all new accounts so it can be tried out before subscribing although with no contract period it would only cost £1 to test for a whole month.
Depending on how the service is used over time I will probably add an unlimited sites package for a fixed monthly payment as the £1 a month will built up if a lot of sites are being used.
For now I am going to monitor the system closely to make sure its functioning as expected and work on adding new features to the system.
If you have any feedback or comments please email me.
Last week I finally got around to porting the .tel Chrome extension I made to Firefox, unlike the Chrome extension this took a whole day to figure out but I can see why.
Chrome extensions offer a very limited range of ways to interact with the browser while Firefox allows for complete customisation, because of this Firefox extensions are developed in a much more complex but powerful way.
The extension uses the same script as the chrome extension to display the contact information; the sample code I used for this is limited so I have spent the past week working on a new script. Its taken me longer than it should have and i still haven’t done but the new script should display the tel info in a much better way, it will also allow me to make updates and changes as new features get added to the specification.
If anyone does give it a try and finds any problems please let me know in the comments.
For the past 10+ years I have been building websites and I have always built them from scratch, a few years ago I discovered javascript frameworks and have been a big fan of jQuery ever since but the main code for the website has always been coded from a blank canvas. A few weeks ago after hearing different frameworks mentioned I decided to take a look into them and on the advice of the BNM list I decided on Code Igniter as a starting point. Code Igniter seems to be in the middle when compared to different frameworks, it will do a lot for you but it is very easy to set up and as a result doesn’t do as much as bigger systems such as Symfony.
I had decided on the framework but needed an idea for a website, I turned to my girlfriend for suggestions and she came back with ‘happy’, as you probably imagine I looked a little puzzled.
Despite being an odd topic I came up with the idea of a social aggregation site around the topic of happiness.
It took an evening but I came up with a very basic, one page site that displayed twitter posts and flickr images all related to the topic happy, the next evening I added a couple more pages to narrow the range to just text, photos or videos.
This was a very basic site but it was a nice introduction to the framework and how easy it is to deal with, I especially like the automatic url structure, rather then messing around with htaccess files to get the address looking nice it happens automatically.
I mentioned in a previous post that I am planning on pursuing a career as a freelance developer, in order to make this work I need more experience using different technologies and systems so I am currently playing around with a few simple projects including Chrome extensions.
Earlier in the week I took a look at the extensions developer guide and was surprised at how simple making an extension appeared to be, I had been updating my .tel domain the previous day so I cam up with the idea for an extension which would scan a page for a .tel address and display the associated contact information.
I used the Mappy sample extension as a starting point as it offered similar functionality; after getting the code to identify and return a .tel address I moved onto displaying the .tel information.
This was harder than I was expecting, all the contact information associated with a .tel address is stored in its DNS records so it can’t just be queried as you would a web service, thankfully Telnic provide some sample code so after spending an evening working with that I came up with a script which would display the contact details when passed a domain name.
At this point it was just a simple case of updating the extension to display the contact information in an iframe and it was done.
A few years ago when I was organising trips for the University mountaineering club and wanted a better way to collect peoples names for climbing weekends I decided to build the trip list application for Facebook. It took 2 days but I came up with a very usable application for setting up a trip and allowing people to sign up. After I finished my stint as social secretary for the club I forgot about the application and just left it to fend for itself.
I have recently decided to pursue a career as a freelance web developer so I decided to go back to the application to refresh my Facebook programming skills; I have spent a few hours over the past week improving the application and fixing a few issues that arose as a result of changes to the Facebook platform over the years. I have now finished and have an application that works well again.
It’s been fun working on Facebook again, it really is an easy platform to develop for. There are a number of quirks to get used to and things you can’t do and Facebook’s recent changes regarding messaging are an interesting change. They now don’t want applications contacting users through the site itself, they either need to email the user directly or they can place a number (think unread count) next to the application name in the sidebar. Both of these methods don’t seem ideal but I can see why they are making this change, in their eyes these changes are further separating the application and its identity from Facebook preventing annoying spammy apps from affecting the brand.
Code Igniter seems to be in the middle when compared to different frameworks, it will do a lot for you but it is very easy to set up and as a result doesn’t do as much as bigger systems such as 
