Practical PHP Scripts and Tips

This blog has had rather a colourful (or “colorful” in US/web spelling!) history over its lifetime.

First it was my business blog … I had a business long ago “Deaken Creative” based on family tradition — “Deaken” coming from my name, Dean Kennedy. However, with “Deakin University” in my home state of Victoria, Australia, “www.deakencreative.com.au” was to confusing … so I changed the URL to dc.com.au.

That was back in the early 1990′s when .com.au registrations were still free! That domain is now part of a media/publishing business, but no longer as Deaken Creative, but dc.com.au Media.

Anyway, my next business name was “Terrabyte Communications” … and rather than buy a new URL, I simply used a sub-URL which you see here. “Terrabyte” was conceived from “terra” –earth, and “byte” — digital … long before the storage capacity “terabyte” became popular.

Anyway, Terrabyte Communications was a bit of a mouthful too, so along came my next business name, DMK Business Systems — which might sound quite long, but as “DMK” is easy to shorten. Finally.

But during the time I had the Terrabyte business name, I was creating websites and getting into PHP. I created a simple, 3-line date script that solved a problem: I lived in Melbourne, Australia, but my server lived in Pennsylvania, USA. I wanted my website to show my local Melbourne time … so I learned enough PHP to solve this little issue.

At the time, central PHP repositories like HotScripts and others were really in their infancy … so partly by default my little PHP script more attention than I would have imagined, several years ago getting 1000s of monthly downloads.

So the next iteration of this website tried to cover a whole range of web marketing and design topics … really way to much for what I could handle.

So I’m narrowing down the topics a bit, especially since I’ve had about 3 years of letting the site stay inactive.

The new focus will be where my PHP skills started … little scripts and tips designed to make the web experience more enjoyable (and leaving your website visitors to wonder a little about “how did you do that?” — especially as PHP is a server-side tool).

Anyway, enough story … time to get cracking again on PHP.