Thursday, 27 November 2008

Reporting data in PHP

Has anyone got a good reporting library for PHP/MySQL based sites?

I'm working on songoftheelves.com and I'm tracking downloads of chapters to get some stats on who's downloading what and when.

I wanted to present these stats in a nice table and be able to drive the table as to group the results arbitrarily by time, date, which chapter and/or user. Googling for a library to do this didn't turn up anything useful immediately, so I'm throwing one together, not MySQL specific, able to be driven by an arbitrary data source (MySQL, an array, XML feed, etc).

If anyone wants to save me from re-inventing the wheel and point me in the direction of something similar, that would be much appreciated! This must be a commonly encountered problem, so there must be a pre-existing solution out there somewhere. If not, there will be soon.

Monday, 3 November 2008

Image Navigation Firefox Extension

I've been working on an extension for Firefox for a while now. It's aim is to allow you to browse through image urls sequentially, prefetching the next image to remove delay. A use case is someone sends you a link to an image, rather than the gallery page (or there is no gallery), you can click buttons to go to the next/previous image in the sequence.

A few months ago I put the source code on code.google.com so I could work on it when I'm not at home, and hopefully get some interest in the project. The url is http://code.google.com/p/imagenav-firefoxextension/.