Confessions about blogging and some stuff about PHP (and bookstores)

Tim keeps reminding us to blog. I don't need reminding really - I remind myself all the time, I just never get around to doing it. I would like to think I can sit down and create a well thought out piece of genius... and that takes time, so I end up never blogging about anything - and here's the relevance to my MIM degree... I am a prefectionist and that makes me a procrastinator. Very relevant to the (un)successful completion of a degree, don't you think?

Anyway, over the next few days I intend to get around to blogging about all the things I have made handwritten notes about after each of Tim's lectures. (It's true! These notes do exist!)

In the meantime, some useful PHP-related sites/pages I have come across can be found at:

• http://www.phpfreaks.com
• http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/99/21/index2a.html
• http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp
• http://www.oscommerce.com (this is specifically to do with the osCommerce solution - which I'm a big fan of. It can do so much, almost as cleverly as Amazon.com - at least as far as the end user is concerned - eg, "people who bought this also bought this").

I could extend on that last point - the point about purchase referrals and linking purchasing habits to a user's login. This "intelligence" is a little limited. Using the Amazon example again - if it were a "bricks and mortar" bookstore, I could walk into that bookstore looking at books on crochet for my mum, and WWII for my dad. If I buy these books, it doesn't mean that I want to be mailed every time a new crochet or WWII book is published, nor does it mean that people interested in crochet are necessarily interested in WWII.

(I can't help but feel that blogging is one part useful, and nine parts "wank") ;)

Learning Proposal

My project/learning proposal - a slightly altered version of what was outlined in my previous post, can be found at http://students.mim.iml.uts.edu.au/users/10539423/Project-Proposal/LearningProposal-JD.html

Proposed Project for Digital Media Technologies

For my project I would like to create PHP pages to update an online ad (built out of Flash), which uses XML script to feed values into the ad.

An ad for an airline might need to have ticket prices updated every few hours – without using dynamic data, a new Flash creative would need to be built each time, and re-trafficked etc. An alternative would be to build a Flash “shell” that read an XML file, and the XML file could be updated via PHP script that would change the values of the fields/XML placeholders.

There could also be log files created that displayed what time/date changes where made and what values were updated. Log files could be replaced by a MySQL database. Not sure if creating log files or a MySQL database for this project is realistic, or if I would be over-extending myself (probably the latter).

I intend to create the PHP pages and the XML script. I can have a colleague of mine create a simple Flash shell (I have almost no ActionScript knowledge and it is not part of this course’s syllabus).

Nokia Develops Mobile Ad Server

Well, aren't Nokia pro-active little handset manufacturers? ;)

http://www.adotas.com/2007/03/nokia-enters-mobile-ad-business/

One of the biggest challenges in mobile ad serving at the moment is trying to standardise ad formats, as well as the MIME types and display sizes of the phones that receive the ads.

There are third-parties who provide handset data to ad servers to enable targeted serving of ads, and various ad servers are developing technology to serve to handsets and track campaign success and unique users. There are still lots of grey areas, and that's not even taking into consideration the different networks and how THEY operate.

For Nokia to take on the task is pretty ballsy (and man do I wish I had their budget to invest in "sticking-neck-out" ventures). If their offering works and becomes the easiest way for advertisers to start using mobile campaigns, Nokia's existing phone specs may heavily sway the decisions made around how and what to standardise - just as TCP/IP standardised communication across the Web.