This is a website designed to share motorsport news and videos.  Once logged in, you can view feeds from various websites and have the option to share them on the home page to comment and rate.  

 

There is also a countdown calendar to the next race for sports covered, as well as relevant Twitter feeds.  A mobile view allows content to be displayed seamlessly - whenever the screen is detected to be less than a certain width, mobile view is enabled by adding a class to the main container.   Items are then selected through CSS based on this new container to switch dynamically between views when required.

 

The content for the feeds section is dynamically retrieved from public RSS feeds after a fixed period of time, and the first 200 characters of the feed are stored in a local database, so as not to keep pounding external servers each time a page loads.  The URL of the original article is also stored, so a link is displayed to view the whole article - the website acting as a kind of advertisement for multiple relevant websites.

 

View site

This application is all about managing tasks. To begin with, click the 'create new task list' at the bottom. This then opens a panel in which the list can be named, and items inserted into it.

If logged in, changes are saved automatically so when you revisit the page, your previous settings remain, including the name and state of each task.

Click here to use

An interactive motorsport calendar. It contains events for 2011, and displays the status of each event - whether past, present or future - and highlights this in the interface.

For F1 events, there's also the option to view an archive of races from the BBC website's Classic F1 series.

Click here to use

A game created in JavaScript for your entertainment. Containing retro style glowing graphics - assuming you're using anything better than evil IE8, otherwise you don't get the pretty glows and nice rounded corners. This is an update of the last JavaScript Game I made - I said I'd update it at some point, and here it is. Runs much smoother, although visually I preferred the lighter background looking back, but that's just an easy CSS change.

The idea is to guide the ball through the holes to reach the bottom. The arrow keys, mouse, or a touch screen can be used to control the ball. It technically works on phones as it's not Flash based and widths are set as percentages, but it depends on your screen resolution and graphics provider as to how well it will work.

It heavily uses the jQuery animate tool, as well as the jQuery Rotate plugin, and took around 3 hours to make. The rows are generated randomly with PHP, so the difficulty can also vary slightly between refreshes. A difficulty trigger is activated when the ball reaches the bottom of the screen - when this happens, it speeds everything up as it assumes it has been going too slowly for the player until this point.

High scores are kept locally and per session, but in future it would easily be possible to have them saved in a database. Try it for yourself, it demonstrates itself better than I can explain in words!

Click here to use

A quick app to read RSS feeds from external sources and display them on the page. Three sample feeds are included as demos, along with the ability to add a fourth (which isn't saved).

When clicked, links are expanded to reveal the additional content contained in the feed, as well as a link to the original article. Any images in the feed are displayed directly in the page with styling to prevent them taking over the screen.

Click here to use

A web-based "instant" messaging system - not quite instant because there's a 1.5 second delay while checking for data, since browsers don't have push facilities to be told to retrieve data from the server.

This app requires registration, and from there you can add friends to talk to (assuming they're already registered). An upload function is available to share photos and files, which are then displayed in the page, as well as recent messages. The option to view the past week or day's worth of chat with one particular friend is available, along with email notifications.

It works by sending a request to the server to detect whether an update to a chat has been posted. If it has, the data is then retrieved and instantly animated into the chat window. It's really much more clever than I can put into words - give it a try!

Click here to use

A calendar created in PHP to allow users to add events and appointments easily. Once signed in, clicking on a day will bring up an interface (see image below) to allow an item to be added to that day. Options become available to repeat the event every year, as in a birthday for example, or to make the event visible in the public timeline for everyone to see. The default setting is to not have events publicly visible unless you choose to make it so, and this is why I decided to require users to sign in first, rather than having a free-for-all option as with the chat.


View Calendar

I've made the calendar replace the F1 calendar in the main navigation bar, but you can still view the F1 calendar from the link at the bottom of the page.

I've just uploaded this simple javascript game: Play here.

The idea is that you move the ball through the gates before the screen closes in on you. Been done many times before, but I wanted to see if I could do it using JavaScript rather than the usual way of creating web browser based games - by using Flash.

Because there's no 'on collision' event that I'm aware of (although I have just discovered gameQuery, which may have helped me, but I haven't looked into it yet), I had to simulate collisions. Each row is the same height and the random row lengths pre-processed by the server and therefore accessible by the JavaScript. This meant that I could calculate an x and a y coordinate of the holes - and so if the ball's current position matches a hole, it starts the drop animation to the next level, and moves on to the next hole.

For motion, it's mostly performed using the animate() jQuery command. To be able to apply separate vertical and horizontal motion to the ball, the image for the ball was placed inside a 'playerX' div, which in turn was placed inside a 'playerY' div. This meant that I could apply a drop animation without losing the horizontal momentum already gathered. Initially, it didn't play well as it stopped its horizontal motion on a fall, which wasn't very smooth.

A detection function to test if the ball is on top of a hole runs every 50 milliseconds, so producing a frame rate of 20fps depending on browser (although the game scroll and player motion should be smoother than this as they're not tied to the hole detection function). Within this function however, I added a jQueryRotate plugin, which was very useful. Depending on whether the ball is moving left or right, it updates the rotation value every 50 milliseconds.

Finally, a scoring system was added along with the ability to post high scores. There are many ways of cheating to log an impossible score, but I wasn't overly concerned about this as it wasn't the main principle of the task.

Anyway, have a play.

For my final (for now) web app I've made recently, I've added an instant chat section to the site, but with image and video uploads integrated within the chat. I could spend hours talking about it, but it's probably best explained in action - feel free to try it out and ask me any questions. I've left a few explanation messages on there for you to read.

Chat here.

Continuing on from my feedreader webapp, I've updated the motorsports calendar I created earlier in the year, and made it ready for next year's events. It's a little quicker, and the added external links now load on demand rather than all at once initially, which saves the server a lot of rummaging around in databases. It's done in PHP with MySQL and jQuery scripts.

The image is how it'll look in the middle of next year, once a few races have taken place. It checks the current date and adjusts the styling depending on whether each race is a future race, a past race or a current race. All events listed are two- or three-day weekend events, so there's a good chance that if you look at the page on a weekend in 2011, there'll be at least one form of motorsport on.

External links to past races are displayed to highlights of past races hosted on the BBC website, as well as to iPlayer if it detects that an F1 race was shown within the last seven days, and so the race will be available on iPlayer. Once a race has completed, a results link appears that takes you to the official F1 website, assuming they don't adjust their link formats in the meantime.

Have a look.

I've just created a feed reader in PHP and Javascript to quickly view favourite sites. It's also possible once signed in to manage your own feeds so that only you can view them, and also to not see the default ones I have added.

On the feed, you get the usual title and links sections so when you click it takes you to the article. When hovering over the feed, you also get the option to expand the feed list to view older articles (assuming the RSS feed goes longer than 10 articles), or to view the article itself - if the article is included in the description tags on the RSS feed, which is the standard. As it relies on other people's sites being done in the same way, little sections don't work, but I've added some exceptions to help work around those. It's set up so that if a website is down where the feed is hosted, it will skip that one and continue, rather than breaking the whole page.

My main reason for creating it is that I couldn't find a reader that worked exactly how I wanted - so I decided it was easier to make my own. The closest I have found to a reader I want is Newsrack for the iPhone, which I like, although when you're sat at a PC, it's pretty pointless looking at your phone.

Next step will be to improve the speed (Firefox Beta 7 helps a little for this), as it gets a bit clunky at times. The code also needs tidying up as I've been tweaking and refining. As it's only me working on it so haven't felt the need to clean up or comment my scripts like I normally would. I may change the styling slightly for an iPhone version, although the app I mentioned does a good job already I probably won't bother, unless it unexpectedly becomes amazingly popular. Loading icons would be handy too, so you know it's trying to do something (or the internet has broken).

Update: Loading icons have now been added. Also included a sidebar to add favourite links that you can return to later - works when signed in and not, so you can either have a personalised set of bookmarks, or a public set that anyone can use. Added a history too, to keep track of which sites have been updated since you last visited the page. Optimised the loading and animation a little, but it still needs the code tidying up further, It's getting there!


Handily, the loading is done with jQuery, so you only load the page once and everything animates within the page whenever you click on something.

Have a play here.

I've been working on this extension to my website for the last few days, and it's ready to be viewed and played around with. It's an online version of Blackjack, created with PHP, Javascript and MySQL, and can be played as single or multiplayer - to test out the multiplayer, just open another browser window and be another player. The aim is to get a hand as close to 21 without going over, and to beat the dealer (not the other players - each individual player just plays against the dealer).

Aces count as one or eleven, whichever is better for you - this is taken account of in the game and adds the higher value as long as it won't make you go over 21. A 2 is worth 2, 3 worth 3, etc, and face cards are worth ten.

It requires cookies and obviously Javascript to be enabled. The Javascript is the main workings of the game, calling a PHP function to check the SQL database when updates have been made, then refreshing section of the screen in an Ajax style way, allowing other sections (such as the chat) to continue independently without interruption. An auto kick function is added, so that if any player leaves without clicking the leave button, the game doesn't just cripple to an indefinite halt - players can then return when they're back.

One of the most difficult challenges was working out how to accommodate new players, and also those that leave without destroying the game. I decided to add a value to the database when a new player joins, and have them wait until the next deal, then update them into the game. A player leaving caused more problems, but I resolved this by first adding the timer so they have to leave if they don't actually click the leave button, then if they do click to leave, it takes the player's cards with them. Initially, it meant that a leaving player transferred their cards onto the next player, which would be a bit harsh if they were a bad hand. So this player is still 'in' the game even after leaving, even though their cards and score aren't visible, a message is noted that a player has left, and they are then removed at the next round.

I then added a chat function, since the server was already calling a PHP script every couple of seconds, it may as well check the file size of the saved chat, then update if it's larger. A javascript function to then force the div to automatically scroll to the bottom (and so the updated messages) is also called when loading new data. The line required, for anyone that may find this useful (it took me quite a bit of Googling, hopefully you'll fare better), was:

Where chat_div is your div ID.

It doesn't include all of the rules of Blackjack just yet - but enough to form a functioning game. Features such as splitting a hand, betting and keeping track of high scores will come in the future.

Try it out, and let me know what you think, and if you find any errors. I'm aware of quite a few ways to cheat, but I left some of the ways I thought of in there as they were handy debuggers - I'll remove them when I come to finish everything off.

www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blackjack

Well, here it is. My first tutorial. I've decided to write this tutorial on creating a basic RSS/XML feed in PHP because it's something I couldn't really find a good tutorial on to suit my needs, so hopefully this will help somebody out. The same technique can also be applied to create XML feeds for sitemaps, which is always good for search engines.

I'll assume you have content being fed from an SQL database, know how to connect to the database from your website to display the information, and this is the content you expect to be put into your feed. It's quite a basic tutorial, so aimed at PHP novices, as I guess many tutorials are as that's kind of the point.

To begin with, create a blank .xml file on your website, and give it full control access in your web host settings. Mine's in the root of my website - http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/rss.xml.

Next, in your admin area, make the rss.php page. This needs to include your database connection information as usual.

Then from this point onwards, the RSS/XML content will be added to as one single variable in PHP. This means the file will effectively be one long line, but web browsers and feed readers will sort this out and make it into a sensible layout as long as all the tags are correct.

The XML file needs to start with a definition and a channel open tag:

Note the ".=" to keep adding to what is previously in the variable without discarding it.

Continue by adding title and description tags for your feed. A title tag I would say is the minimum, but if you don't even want that you can skip this section I guess.

Now for the feedy goodness. Grab your SQL from the database like you would for a normal page:

And open up tags to start a new feed item:

Add the title of the item, or whatever your table field heading is, then close the item tag.

Next comes the description. In my description I just have the date and category, rather than reformatting the text:

Last tag to be entered in my feed is the all-important link. Just to make it easier, I've linked it to the ID of the relevant item, which the page then uses PHP GET to decide what to display by grabbing the ID from the URL.

Remember to close the item tag, then rinse and repeat as necessary. If all your data is contained within one table, this should be enough to display everything. The close bracket here is to end the while loop, while the close item tag only ends this current part of the feed, before continuing down the rest of the table as required.

Finally, close your channel and RSS tags that are still open.

Now to actually write the file. Using the empty file we created earlier, the PHP fwrite command is used to add the $xml variable we have just created into the file. Remember that PHP will only allow relative links in this stage.

Last thing to do then is simply to close the PHP tag.

To add some confirmation that it has been created (or rather, that nothing went wrong if you see no error), a simple link to the file is always helpful.

And that's it, you should now have a working RSS feed. To make the feed visible in your web browser like on many websites, add this to your head tags on the pages you want the RSS feed to be visible:

As with most web things, there are many ways of doing the same thing, and this is simply one of them. I'm not suggesting it is the best way, but it works for me, so I hope this will help someone. I appreciate any comments, let me know if it's any use to you, or any requests for future tutorials!