In spite of all this, I explored the option of moving my friends’ sites to GoDaddy after some disappointing downtime with my current hosting company (Bluehost), because hey, if it’s better, go with it, right? Alas, their shared hosting environment was…icky.

• My applications were using the $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable.  Apparently if you set up a site as a subdomain, GoDaddy puts that variable’s value into a $_SERVER['SUBDOMAIN_DOCUMENT_ROOT'] variable (which I don’t think is particularly standard) and leaves the document root blank.
• They also only gave me a public_html folder, whereas Bluehost gives me a level above that, allowing me to store my application code in a non-web folder making it slightly less exploitable.
• They also only gave me two options for the database: accessible remotely with a user with full permissions or not, and no permissions to create my own users. Bluehost allows me to create my own users and restrict remote access by IP address, which is way more secure.

Anyway, I decided to give up, because that was just too much compromise for me…even if their pages do load 2-3 times faster.  :(  Sorry GoDaddy, I’m sticking with Bluehost…you’re not worth it.

I really like how CodeIgniter makes session management easy…you don’t have to worry about all the session_start()s and such, and setting up a basic authentication system took about 15 minutes with some help from a tutorial.  Although I’d like to modify it to make it so the session expires if the browser window is closed… /makes note on TODO list. :D

Also, database stuff seems pretty easy too, and I like how simple it is to run a query with parameters…you basically just write your SQL with some ?’s, and pass that string with an array of values to the db object.  No funkiness with escaping quotes, stripping stuff out for SQL injection, binding or anything…very clean and simple.

I like clean and simple. :)

Unfortunately, as in the example above, “Dentist Appt” and “Dentist Appointment” are not exactly the same value, even though they have the same human meaning.

Luckily I discovered a handy little php function called similar_text(), which will compare two strings and either return the number of shared characters, or what percentage of the string is the same.  So instead of saying “if event name is equal to event type, don’t show event name,” I now have something like “if event name is 85% similar to event type, don’t show it.”  This seems to work pretty well, so yay! :)

• a large image in the left column, fixed width
• the thumbnails to switch images in the right, fixed width
• the title and description in the middle, stretchy

What I initially came up with had problems when the browser was resized to 800 or smaller (text overlapping thumbnails, images and text wrapping incorrectly all over the place).  So after way too much time messing around with it, I finally ended up with something like:

• the left column floated left, fixed at 385px (including 15px of right padding)
• the right column floated right, fixed at 247px (including 7px of left padding, appearing as 15 when combined with the 8px from the li’s inside) and a left gray border
• the center column *not* floated, no width, with a left margin of 385px and a right margin of 262px (to give an extra 15px of “padding” on the other side of the gray border

This seemed to work; when scaled way down, the center stretchy text column floats under the large image and will wrap around/under the image and the thumbnails if the description text is excessively long.

I wish divs were as easy to work with for column layouts like this as tables…I try so hard to avoid tables because they’re a horrible faux pas nowadays.  Maybe I’m just rusty at cutting up sites, but bleh.

I’ve tried playing around with Joomla and Drupal, but they seem so big and clunky and have a steep learning curve.  My experiences with trying to set up a Joomla site include a) getting a 404 error that refused to go away no matter how many pages I set up, and b) pages not showing up no matter where I put them or how they were reorganized.  Maybe I’m just a dumb user, but if I as a computer person have a hard time figuring it out, I’m pretty sure people less versed in maintaining websites aren’t going to have an easier time.  If it’s going to take that much effort to figure it out and get a site up and running, I may as well just keep it simple and build it from scratch, sheesh.

But I digress.

Er, actually I guess that about covers it. :)  WordPress is awesome!