To many web application developers user management is the bane of their existence; to quickly and easily implement an user managment system, they would usually have to build their own. But wait! Here comes UserCake, a simple, flexible and customizable ready to go user management system.

Check out the blurb:

‘There are many user systems on the internet and a lot of tutorials too. Sadly many are convoluted, poorly written and insecure.

The goal of UserCake is to provide people with a foundation to build user applications without all the hassle. UserCake is cleanly written, well commented, formatted and documented, did I forget to mention its object oriented for easy customisation? Simple codebase means developing with UserCake is simple and most importantly fast.

UserCake is fully opensource, you may download and re-distribute the code in any form, a link back to the project would be nice, but not required. Enjoy!’

Now does that sound cool or what? I Haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but I most defiantly will.

A while ago I wrote that I was working on certain projects that where of the development variety. I am now pleased to say that one of them is finally complete and the other one is, well, not so complete. Let’s skip over that small detail and focus on the subject at hand. The completed project is called ‘Prompt Me’; and it has a very simple goal; that is to select and display a random writing prompt (that I have wrote) from the database and display on screen. Which by all accounts it does (though there are only about 20 prompts at the moment).

The technical stuff

I wrote The application with the use of the codeigniter PHP library that made development of it much easier. The front was very easy to implement and went as smoothly as it possibly could. The back end, on the other hand, went a little less smoothly; I’ll spare you the details but will say this I now fully appreciate how much hard work goes into creating any bespoke application.

I would like to apologise for the absolutely, positively disgusting design. I will – one day – redesign it but for now, at least it looks better than most of the other applications of the same nature.

Now, why not check out Prompt Me

It’s been a long time since I last looked at Thingamablog, the blogging system that creates HTML files and FTPs them to your server, which, basically saves time editing pure HTML files and manually having to upload them.

It seems that something is changing over on the development front, which is a good thing since it has been a very long time since the last update. Though I’m a wordpress user now, I still hold an interest in the project because it gives hope to those (very few) that don’t have PHP installed on there server. I once ported themes to the blogging system, but unfortunately mediafire delete all my files and the originals are long gone.

I just thought the software was worth mentioning.

On a more personal note

I have finally finished the development of my first ‘built from scratch’ web application; though I’m lazy and haven’t gotten around to setting it up on the server yet.

Sky Drive Logo

SkyDrive?

SkyDrive is an online storage solution developed by Microsoft. I t allows users to store documents, music, videos, photos etc..

What’s this about an Update!

Recently Microsoft updated ‘SkyDrive’, there file hosting solution. The update consisted of a few small upgrades such as giving the user the ability to download entire folders as Zip files, adding a slide show capability for users photos and making the service available in more countries, in more languages. The biggest upgrade to the service is that the storage capacity jumped from an average 5GB to a huge 25GB storage capacity. 25GB may not be enough to store all files from your hard drive but you have to admit, it a lot of storage for a free service.

What’s the catch?

Yes, as always there is a catch. Though the service is free and has a storage capacity of 25GB; the maximum size of a file or folder can only 50MB. This seems a bit odd doesn’t it? 25GB of storage but users can only upload a 50MB folder. I no next to nothing about business but I have a theory. I think this is where Microsoft is going to make their money from this service. Give a huge amount of capacity space away for free but only allow the user to upload a 50MB file and if they want to upload bigger file sizes then charge them extra.

Any Good?

Though I just started using SkyDrive, I can say that it has a better user interface than say, media fire (another online storage solution). It’s not plastered in ads like media fire and because it’s Microsoft I know that they won’t loose my files (like media Fire did). I wouldn’t use SkyDrive to distribute software or media files but as a personal storage solution I think it’s a great service from Microsoft. Now that’s a rare thing.