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My Work

This is a collection of my work on my website in a series of posts. I originally had a page full of links to pages but it grew to be too hard to maintain. Instead I now make a post, create a new subcategory for the project/work under my work and list it here. There is a listing by type of work in the menu on this website which is easier to navigate if you’re looking for a specific project.

My Work:Chris-Portela.com V6

 Chris Portela.com, Computers, Hacking, Internet, My Work, Programming, Web Development, Web Sites  No Responses »
Sep 082011
 

I do not have an image for my website to show you this time. This is because I lost all of the code for this website a long time ago. It was eventually so horrible that I deleted it. I couldn’t even load the page without errors so I would have had trouble getting a screenshot anyways.

I’ll use this as a chance to explain the pitfalls I encountered making this website and how you should avoid them in your website but also as a history lesson of my old website.

It was created using PHP which I had just learned from Tizag.com. At that time I just learned PHP only and no understanding of how to organize my code. A horrible mistake on my part and which my dad warned me on and I promptly ignored as well. Reason being that I created a website the worked! For the first time ever I made a server-side powered website that actually did something! It was, to say the least, VERY liberating to finally have gotten to the point of making a website. Not to say it looked that great, did much, or even did it well, but it did something.

I can’t remember for sure but I think I could update the pages using a web interface. I could also update certain things that showed up on the website. I do however know I did create a section for people to upload ‘Current Events’. The deal was that our teacher never actually checked the current events. It was just important that we made sure to not all turn in the same one or turn in the same ones every week. However all I made was a place for people to contribute to the place by adding new Current Events. The idea behind that being that if we all created one current event we could alternate between each other and build a collection to use repeatedly. It did not but it was a good try I thought.

However one day during math class, we were using the computers and disaster struck. I loaded my website out of curiosity and clicked a link. All of a sudden my website when in to a crazy error and nothing was working. The whole website crashed and it looked like my login.php was the source of the error. The problem also with this was that login.php was required for the whole website and powered a good deal of the functionality. Most of the website was created with login.php providing the authentication. So you can imagine I just did something to the website that causes this issue to occur. Apparently not because 3 hours later for me and another hour or two with my dad solved no bug…

My website was dead… the cause? SPAGHETTI CODE.

Login.php was a horrible piece of code. I couldn’t figure it out my self either I just knew it worked and that if I kept using the session variables and cookies it set that I could get what I needed and provide the features I wanted. However it was over… the website had died.

Thats when I created my temporary flash website of Chris Portela V7.net so I could create Chris Portela V7.net

 Posted by at 15:46

My “fun” Work: Stupidity

 Desktop, My Work, Stupidity  No Responses »
Sep 032011
 

Not very impressive but one of my favorite projects and actually probably one of my stupidest ones as well; which goes along with the theme I guess. It’s a little game… it asks which person you think between “Mikey” and “Jason” is stupid-er. And in the end they’re both at least 50% stupid while I’m like 0% stupid. All for laughs of course but a tad bit mean. Both were good friends of mine which were obviously, from they’re work and etc., very intelligent so calling them stupid really didn’t matter to anyone…

Anyways it’s one of my fun projects I’ve done.

 Posted by at 15:14  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My “fun” Work: Why?

 Desktop, My Work, Why?  No Responses »
Sep 012011
 


Back in September 2008 I created ‘WHY’ a C#.NET Click-Once Windows forms application for fun. I admittedly do not do many ‘fun’ projects and most of my projects are very business type focuses because this is how my dad influences my programming. However, I have always liked this application because it’s just fun but very geeky.

Here is the idea… what is the answer to why? Why not of course! It’s the punch line of the cocky college student who answers the question to a professor with Why Not and gets that A+ where everyone else is trying to do the same essay and write these crazy long essays and get lower grades. This program though is different because once I runs it’s covering the entire screen and prevents trying to exit the application. Although it’s not entirely successful in keeping the user from killing(stops alt-f4 but at the time I never figured out much more than that) it it’s good enough for someone who doesn’t know that much about the computer to see them unable to get out of this age old question.

Another fun feature in this application is the ‘stop it’ button… So you want out then? That sucks cause the only thing that button will do for you is make a pop-up window show up telling you to answer the question… But it gets so much funnier when someone who is very angry and kind of stupid keeps clicking the button and gets 10 pop-up windows telling them they have angered the program and it will bother them this way every time after that that they click the button.

HAVE FUN! Prank someone today! I think I’ll be releasing the code to GitHub or at least updating the app with some more features like… real blocking so a user is rendered defenseless to this application.

http://updates.chrisportela.com/why/

 Posted by at 18:03  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Looks like I’m doing a good job…

 Chris Portela.com, Web Development  No Responses »
Jul 272011
 

I didn’t expect this website to get any more popular but apparently I’m putting together content that people want to read.

Those are the monthly statistics since I’ve started my website. I have not advertised at all and do not provide any services on my website. I think that it’s been going up pretty quickly or at least hasn’t been going down. It reached 532 visitors in May and 443 in June. July is already at 398 and probably going to get close to 500. Now I just need to figure out why my ads aren’t bringing in any money… :\

 Posted by at 19:06  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Changed the domain!

 Chris Portela.com, Web Development  No Responses »
Jul 122011
 

Currently both ChrisPortela.com and Chris-Portela.com work for both sending me emails and accessing my website. I’ve been wanting to make the switch for a while especially since my Chris-Portela.com domain is a bit harder sell to people. The dash is hard to explain and usually embarrassing.

While I haven’t finished changing all the links to chris-portela.com or anything I know I need to at least change ones on my website. I will be doing this soon.

 Posted by at 21:06

NYAN CAT PWNED!

 Computers, Hacking, Hacking, Internet, My Work  No Responses »
Jul 062011
 

I HAVE NYANED FOR 568426081.5 SECONDS! http://t.co/cUOwcZg via @nyannyancat

Normally I try to stay normal and write real English, even on the internet, but I really couldn’t help but give this post this title since I totally destroyed nyan.cat which is a website that lets you test your mettle in terms of how long you take listening to that stupid cat meow in Japanese…
My solution to this was to hack the simple JavaScript code behind it which was pretty easy after like maybe 10 minutes of looking though the code for where it saved the the date were it started. Then I ran in the issue which is kinda weird. When I tried to edit the cookie in chrome directly I thought it would be intelligent and save it as a date again. Instead it saved it a string and then caused the poor nyan cat to say I was doing it for Nan seconds. It was long till I figured it there was no other way than using the JS console and just changing the value directly so I made it go back in time… all the way back to 1993.

So in summary… I made a website which probably hasn’t been around for a year at most (I’m not sure, I just found out about it so I’m just guessing here) say I’ve been watching a stupid pop-tart cat (STUPID?! OMG NOOOOSSS!) since about 3 months before I was even born… Sounds logical enough for me.

 Posted by at 10:13  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Work: Gaderio

 Gaderio, My Work, Web Sites  No Responses »
May 212011
 

This website was part of a project I was doing in International Business class for a fake company we created called Gaderio. It was a Brazilian chocolate company which we based out of Georgia. It was one my more impressive visual designs I’ve made before. When we show cased this website as part of a school-wide project to use technology more in the class room my website was easily able to out shine the websites created in the Web Design II class. I wasn’t surprised but it made a big point of how much further ahead I was.

This website isn’t very fast to download though. It was created for being viewed on a local computer with basically instant access. The images aren’t very small and so the website needs to load for a couple seconds first before being viewed. So please forgive any slowness in the loading and viewing of the website. The JavaScript is also set to load last so please let the rounded corner effects load as well.

Because no one would be using this website it has only a page or two of PHP code which spit back fake invoices. And those invoices are one line saying “we’re going to send you a box, thanks!” So the website is very static and therefore was very easy to make.

Development issues

During this I tried many different ways to develop this website while in school. I got GIMP portable and notepad2 Portable, I used Mozilla’s Bespin Project(Now SkyWritter), and I even just tried sitting there in class. None of it worked. In the end all of those things just made it all too difficult to make the website. The computers were just too damn slow and on top of that most of the time we were only using the Macs which proved difficult to create websites on with the programs I had gotten. I eventually just did it at home on my beloved ThinkPad T60p

I also used NiftyCorners for the rounded corners on my website. I’ve used it for almost all my projects except for a couple ASP.NET projects where I experimented with ASP.NET AJAX rounded corner effects and then I went back to NiftyCorners. I totally recommend those for any rounded corner effects although their draw back is that to load the page quickly they must take effect after the page loads.

Once I finished it I uploaded it to an account I had with x10hosting.com which was canceled later once I stopped visiting the forums as was required to remain an active account.

 Posted by at 19:44  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Work: Southcore Realty

 My Work, Southcore Realty, Web Sites  No Responses »
May 212011
 

I took this project on for my friend to create a dynamic website that could be easily managed by someone who knew nothing about web developing. It featured custom pages(Like WordPress), Listings of homes for sale with ability to “feature” certain ones, an admin panel, image uploading, and many other features. It was, however very nice looking and cool, still flawed in that it was a pure PHP project which I did with the intentions of “Just getting done.” So although you can read the code for the website it’s not very clean or easy to maintain. It is my best PHP website before I began to use CakePHP

Although I never met the person who wanted this website, the friend I mentioned did all the business for me and I did the work, it turned out he never did anything with the website. Looking at the website today it appears that the owner has done nothing with the website. I have never been able to talk to him but either he felt it was too hard or did not care that much to take care of the website. The pages on the website were created by my friend and then we were paid. Afterwards checking back on this website it appears to be a dud which is kind of disappointing to me. I think there were several areas where the website was a not user-friendly. Thankfully CakePHP, which if you can’t tell I love greatly, has solved many of those issues I used to have. But this website was not all that flawed and I don’t understand why the owner doesn’t use it more. Checking back on the website I have noticed that it is still fully functional, fast, and easy to use. Even the old issue of FckEditor loading slowly was not much of an issue on a strained connection which I’m writing this from.

One of my proudest achievements, this was my first real business projects that I completed.

Go to: Southcore Realty.com(DEAD LINK: I guess he didn’t keep the website. I still have the code just in case I would need to show it off though)

 Posted by at 17:10  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Organization of my Work

 My Work  No Responses »
May 212011
 

On my website I used to have a single page with all of my work. It was sort of hard to understand what each project was, what I learned, or what it all even meant.

Now instead of making a single page I have created a new way of organizing my projects, work, and ideas on my website.

By using Custom Menus in WordPress I’m going to be using my categories to organize posts about each project on my website. Since I’m going to be, for the most part, talking about projects I’m working on then it only makes sense to take this path instead of trying to manage an endless number of WordPress pages.

This will be my first post in this category and will serve to just act as a place marker for my categories and stuff.

 Posted by at 16:52

I’ve created this new blog!

 Chris Portela.com  No Responses »
Aug 122010
 

I hope this new wordpress website will be all I need for my website to function I think its going to be enough finally. After years of making my own website and dealing with the issues of developing it my self entirely I’m DONE. I almost had built my own CMS, Project management, etc website but it was just TOO much for what time I had and I need this website to work. It doesn’t look good if a web developer can’t get his OWN website to work right? Well now I do and I think it looks cool, works well, and be perfect for what I need in the future.

 Posted by at 02:58
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