Oh, hai! No, I’m NOT dead, but I can see how you might have drawn that conclusion. My previous (aka first) post was just over 3 weeks ago. I have a good excuse, though… I’ve been working on stuff!
I seem to have a problem with focusing on my projects… I can’t focus on just one! I currently have about 4 major projects right now. h4x.stats, my latest one, was started about a week ago now. The idea is for it to aid in the distribution of anything I might release, and to also provide me with another opportunity to further my learning.
What is h4x.stats, you ask? Basically it is a link-shortener and click-tracker. The aim is to work similarly to bit.ly. You give it a URL, and it’ll give you back another URL to be posted out to the world. People who click on the new link will have their click logged and will be redirected to the originally intended destination.
Why did I build this? Frankly, because I didn’t want to try working with the bit.ly API. I wasn’t sure that it would provide the functionality I wanted to employ further down the line. Building my own system would solve that issue. The motivation to pursue this right now was another project of mine (which I’m not quite ready to post about yet). I was ready to share my work-in-progress code with friends but wanted to be able to track how many times the files were accessed. I felt as if using bit.ly for the time being would have been rather silly if I was already planning on whipping this up. The concept is simple enough that rigging up a working version like I have now would have been quick and easy.
Working on this was most interesting for me because it’s my first forray into learning jQuery. After weeks of learning “standard” javascript, I decided it was finally time to jump in. It’s been interesting. Working with jQuery speeds up development by a lot! It’s been a pleasant enough experience that I think I’ll start transitioning my other projects over to it.
I don’t have much else to show for this project just yet. I’ll be posting the other fore mentioned project with it soon, and I think that this might be the first thing that I post to my github account! I can’t guarantee it will happen within another three weeks, but we’ll see. Until then… 