MidnightConMan.com - Anime News and Conventions Directory

My most recent PHP project presented me with a few new challenges, and reminded me of a few old ones. This site was meant as a replacement for my Animeimmersion.com website, as I felt that I would better appreciate the anime convention scene in a smaller niche market (after-hours). I am not sure how much time I have spent on this site, as I work on it from time-to-time. This is my most advanced site to date, and here are a few things it has above and beyond the other sites I have built:

• Modular site design: The website is made of small packages that operate indepently of other packages on the site, but can work together in special circumstances.
  
• Single Site Wide Authentication System, which allows for easy and robust authentication of users and visitors.
  
• Dynamic Comments Engine, which allows users to comment on anything on the site.

I have not completed this project as of yet, but should be putting the finishing touches on it within the next few weeks, so stay tuned. As always, I will update this blog as time and body permit.

NiteandDayHosting.com - My Second PHP Project

My second project involved me creating a web site for my Hosting company, I created the engine, design, and an ordering system. This project allowed me to learn general form creation, server-side field verification, and server-side email processing (to alert me when a new order is submitted). This project took me about 3 weeks to complete, from concept to completion. The most tedious and time consuming portion of this project was the design, I spent 3 days researching competitive hosting companies and the sites they created. The engine I created has the following features:

• Server-Side Order Processing, which includes emailing a copy of new orders to administrator.
• Outage Engine, which allows customers to see if there are any network or systems outages at a given time.
• Testimonials Engine. which allows prospective customers to view comments and testimonials of current and past customers.
• Product Information, a breakdown of the features that each product offers and their corresponding price.

If you are looking to start a project like this I would recommend that you thoroughly research your competitors, only with this information can you make a competitive site. After you have completed your research, create a general plan of what features you need and what you want, then decide if its possible to add all of your features or just some of them.

uBuyAnime.com - My First LAMP Project

An anime reviews and sells engine, which uses PHP and MySQL. This project was difficult as I was new to PHP, MySQL, CSS, Smarty, and web design in general, and a project of this size required me to create a simple and intuitive design structure which would allow me to easily add enhancements to the existing code. Well suffice it to say I didn't know what I was doing and at present it is very difficult to add anything to this project, so I am currently working on re-writing this project using my new platform (which is expandable) -- I am getting ahead of myself... So I started off with a basic understanding of MySQL, and a basic understanding of PHP.

I stumbled through the process of creating this application, and would never imagine writing an application in that fashion again, the process was tedious and could have easily been avoided if I did a little bit more research before starting the project, hind site is always 20/20.

Bellow I have added a bulleted list of features that I added to this program, I have omitted the features that are not worth mention:

• Complete categorization of reviews, using a system which allows for unlimited categories.
• Fully functional administrative area which allows adding, editing, and deleting of review information.
• Reviews catalogue, which allows the user to browse the entire reviews database by letter.
• Entire styling of program uses Smarty and CSS, which allows for quick and easy site customization.
  

Introduction

Hello,

My name is Jon Campbell, I am currently attending college to receive my Associates of Science in Traditional Animation. My hobbies include programming web sites in the PHP and Perl programming languages, watching Anime and Science Fiction television shows, and creating Visual Effects in Maya, Z-Brush, and a few other 3D modeling applications.

I will be posting a few websites I have created over the last few years, and links to some of the Visual Effects projects I am currently engaged in. Please feel free to bookmark this site or refer your friends to this site, I will be updating its content as time permits.