GoneWacko’s Blog

Awesome

March 3, 2006 on 1:25 pm | In Computing |

Somewhat technical blog coming up, so if you’re bound not to understand any of it (Martin?) then consider yourself warned.

My scripts page is hardly a day old and already I’ve rewritten it entirely. On the outside, it looks just about the same, but internally, everything is different.
Originally, the pages were just static HTML pages. Now, however, I’m using PHP with XML, which is something I had not done before, apart from the RSS2PNG script.

It’s nothing too revolutionary, but I’m still quite proud of it, because it’s an interesting example of how much my knowledge of PHP has increased over the past 5 days. Maybe I’ll even add one of those ’show source’ links to the script just so my ego can grow a bit more.

So, on to the details. The script makes an index of all the available scripts by looking in every directory in the scripts folder, and checking if there’s a script.xml file inside. If there is, it opens the xml file, takes some of the basic information such as the script’s name and short description, and places it in an array.

Then, when it has placed all the scripts into the array, it just dumps that to the page, in a pretty way.
When you go to the page of a specific script, it also reads the xml file, and just writes all the other information to the screen.
For example, check out the RSS2PNG XML file.

Then I also wrote a little RewriteRule which ended up being a pain in the ass. The RewriteRule makes it possible to go to http://www.gonewacko.com/scripts/rss2png, even though it will technically go to http://www.gonewacko.com/scripts/index.php?script=rss2png.

To do this, I used the following rewrite rule:
RewriteRule ^(\w+)$ index.php?script=$1 [L]
However, this somehow did work on my localhost (Apache 2.2), but it didn’t work on gonewacko.com (Apache 1.3), even though mod_rewrite doesn’t appear to have changed that much at all.
In the end I found out that \w wasn’t working for some strange inexplicable reason, but after replacing it with it’s equivalent,
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$ index.php?script=$1 [L]
everything worked fine. That did take quite a long time to figure out though, probably because I was tired, because I found the solution shortly after waking up this morning

I’m currently planning on doing three things:

• Adding a download counter to the scripts
• Making it possible to write comments about the scripts
• Adding smarty support so I can easily change the layout of the pages

And finally, a quote:

GoneWacko says: Read about it in my magazine, yes
Thomas says: you got your own magazine?
Thomas says:
GoneWacko says: yes
GoneWacko says: GoneWacko Weekly
GoneWacko says: There’s a new issue every month