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.
A gallery view of my wonderful website which I never got the chance to finish unfortunately. I will be going though this website in detail to show what I was able to accomplish, what went right/wrong, and how I could have done it better.
A little lesson that will help me and you!
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This website was my first project in the real world. I created an awesome website which had several hundred users, mainly coaches and parents, and it helped organize and inform everyone of the the plans we had.
(View a gallery of my the website in development)
A summary of the things my website did:
I really didn’t want to update this website my self. I knew what being a ‘web master’ for the team would be and I wasn’t going to have it. I made this dynamic website to allow those who knew what needed to be on the website to put it what they wanted on the website themselves.
Things which at the time were very complex for me. In reality they are pretty complex to handle correctly although looking back I didn’t do it very well. It worked however which was the important thing. Issues I had though were in sanitizing inputs with ASP.NET in the admin section. Luckily my admin area was secure thanks to the ASP.NET login system and my users were not technical enough to try executing an SQL injection but there were many errors which they didn’t understand due to misplaced (‘) and (“). I was able to use ASP.NET and Visual Studio to make the website and maintain it until the day I lost the code. Then I moved on to hack a new calendar in to the website while also working on the Grand-daddy STWEB2.
Some lessons I’ve learned from this website were:
Overall I loved making this website and got a whole bunch of hours from making it as well. I created the Project Manager application simply to track the hours I worked on this project alone. And it did a pretty good job of doing just that.
I have a million screen shots and this website is big enough that I can’t make one post with all of the information about it. Instead I’m going to post these screen shots and make smaller posts about the website over time.
I’ve finished making the first release of my new Android Application to provide AP Scores. I plan on adding all of the AP Tests to the app but for now I just have the AP Computer Science A test working.
Also available is a this testing version of the application to play around with. This is a very rough app with very little to no ‘user friendliness’ because I was simply trying to get the application working. It however does work and it should work completely (no force closes). Again ONLY the APCS test is working so the other tests will do nothing.
Have fun!!
Download the zip compressed unsigned apscores.9-11-11.APK
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
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.
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/
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… :\
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.
I HAVE NYANED FOR 568426081.5 SECONDS! http://t.co/cUOwcZg via @nyannyancat
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.
This is a 2D-barcode containing the address of our mobile site.If your mobile has a barcode reader, simply snap this bar code with the camera and launch the site.
