Updates for this site have been slow recently, mainly because I’ve had so much on at work so when I’ve got home I just want to relax, especially with the good weather we’ve had recently!

Since my last post I’ve been doing a lot of work with asp as well as improving my php and javascript.

I’ll try and get a CSS tutorial or two online in the next few days so keep checking back.

After some users reported problems using my flexigrid with asp and IE I decided to redo some of the code to fix it.

Basically the problem was that when the JSON code generated it is supposed to add a comma (,) to the end of every line apart from the last one. My code put a comma at the end of every line including the last one. Firefox realises this and fixes the problem while IE just dies and wont show the content. All I did was added a quick if statement to the end of the line that checks to see if it’s the last record retrieved from the database or not and sticks the comma on the end if it has to.

I’ve also been working with flexigrid at work as part of an application I’m making which populates the flexigrid with data users have entered using online forms and PDAs. This presented the problem that people dont always enter alpha numeric characters and flexigrid doesn’t seem to like this so I added a function called cleanup that will remove all non alpha numeric characters from your data before it kills flexigrid. This is also included in the new distro. And as a side note, I have had flexigrid working with 3500 records from a Sybase database a work without any problems.

Again, thanks to Paulo for creating flexigrid in the first place! And you can download the new distro of my asp backend here or see the demo here.

I’ve been quite busy lately on work related stuff so I haven’t had too much time (or motivation!) to work on my own sites. I did get a bit of work done on Bored Flash Games though.

My aim with this site is to get as much traffic as I can without spending a penny, partly because I want the challenge and partly because I need to keep all the money I can for my holiday (in 2 months woohoo!).

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

- Banner exchanges. It’s really hard to tell which banner exchanges are any good and which aren’t. After a bit of trial and error, I think I’ve found three that I’m reasonably happy with, they are; MoreGamers(aff), FunKlicks and FunnieLinks. At the monent I haven’t added my banners to the rotation, I’m simply saving up credits for when the site is ready to start making me some money.

- Link-Vault. I’ve been looking at a few different link exchanges and at the minute I prefer Link Vault(aff). It’s free to join and use, all you have to do is display some links on the bottom of your page.

- TNX. TNX(aff) is another link exchange, however this one lets you buy and sell links. Like the banner exchanges, I’m just saving up credits for now until the site is ready to start making money.

When the site does start making money I’ll be putting it al back into promoting the site so I will also be going through paid advertising.

Next step for me is to put some more work into picking the right keywords and deciding which ad networks will be best to use on the website.

Oh, and I almost forgot, traffic is up to around 75 uniques today.

I find that it’s very easy to get bogged down with projects, sometimes even the smallest details can seem to take an age and you never seem to get everything done.

My tip to avoid this is to spend one day every so often just surfing the web, reading about new things and learning. The amount of really cool stuff you come across that would fit great into your next website or application is staggering. It also helps you keep what you’re up to now in perspective.

And last but not least, dont forget to comment on every post you read. If you’re a blogger you’ll know how nice it is to get new comments and it will also help spread the word about your website or blog as you go!

I’ve been playing around with a new website Bored.vc. It’s simply a free arcade for people to play when they’re bored.

The main reason I set it up was because I liked the domain but I’ve neglected the site since then really. I’ve just about finished the custom skin and now I’m looking to exchange links with a few related sites. The link exchanges will be sitewide.

I’ve got a few new seo strategies that I want to test out on this site so traffic should be pretty decent once I’ve did a bit of work on it. My aim is to beat 700 uniques a day (the highest I’ve got with an arcade) within 6 months.