Posted on by julie

The Great SSL Weekend Extravaganza

This past weekend, I embarked upon a task of positively Herculean proportions. With Chrome 68 coming out and the continued emphasis by Google to ensure HTTPS is the default on sites, rather than HTTP, I decided to go ahead and add SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt to, oh, 13 domains that I host, both for myself and for friends and family. (I had a lot of fun posting to my Instagram story about it, too!)

I’d done a test run with one of my domains earlier in the year and, though it wasn’t without a challenge or two, it seemed to go just fine.

The trouble, of course, came when dealing with various WordPress sites (including this one!) because how do you change ALL THE LINKS in ALL THE POSTS and ALL THE PAGES to HTTPS from HTTP? Well, thankfully, there are database queries and free plugins.

While I’ve generated and installed the certificates for all thirteen domains, one of them basically has no traffic, so I haven’t updated that WordPress database yet. Then, there’s another one that is just too daunting for me to bother with right now — two WordPress installations, plus my own hand-coding elsewhere, plus redirects galore… So I said to hell with it for now. I haven’t forced SSL on for either, but both are accessible via HTTPS. When I have more time, I’ll go through them both and force SSL on, after dealing with updating the references in the databases.

In addition to that, I redid my personal homepage at juliemartin.org. Not only does it also have SSL enabled (and forced), but it’s also mobile-responsive! It’s not as pretty as I’d like it, but it’s not bad for a quick redo. I also used PHP Mailer to create a contact form. Additionally, I put in a hidden field that humans can’t see (owing to CSS) as a honeypot for spammers and if that field is filled out, then the form fails to send.

It was in the creation of this form that I realized how much the form’s enctype matters, because if you choose the wrong one, it’s entirely possible that your $_POST array will be completely empty. It worked fine on my own local environment, but I suspect it was getting wiped out by my host’s mod_security in Apache, because I did get a couple of 406 errors, though they weren’t consistent. I spent a good amount of time on Saturday evening wondering why the hell my $_POST array was empty, checking everything, from making sure the form was set to POST to double, triple, quadruple checking the field names.

In the end, the enctype was the issue and everything ran beautifully once I fixed that up. I used Postman to test out a variety of differences between my browser’s POST request and finally found it.

Then I was able to easily code in the hidden field and the failure if there’s anything in it. (Fun fact: I’m pretty certain that the placeholder text in a form does, indeed, count when your conditional is if (!empty ($_POST[’emailaddress’]) though it would most certainly require more testing.)

Overall, I did a crapton of stuff this weekend, I learned a ton of stuff and my brain hurts sufficiently.

In other news, making moves towards ordering parts for a new computer. I’m getting pretty excited about it, not gonna lie.

Next post, pics of my living room setup, I promise. I just got a desk-mounted dual monitor stand from Amazon, which I am in love with and really makes my workspace look awesome.

Until next time!

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PDO, why must you hate me so?

My glorious four-day weekend is just about over and I did a bunch of coding and no writing. I did, however, sit happily in air-conditioned bliss. When the humidity makes it feel like 46C (114F), you kind of don’t want to move, much less leave an air-conditioned room.

I made a lot of progress on switching things over to PDO from mysqli, but it’s still not done. I’m still flailing around, trying to figure out wtf the problems are that I’m experiencing. Here are some of the issues I’ve had so far this weekend, all of which are resolved:

  • I had an errant space in <?php. And that borked everything that came after it. Why I didn’t see the space between the question mark and the p is unknown.
  • I couldn’t figure out how to copy a file to the directory above (and thus, outside) the web directory in my PHP Docker container.
  • I further couldn’t figure out how to actually edit a file in that directory once I was able to copy it, but then inserted a nano install in my Dockerfile. (My original linux/unix experiences were heavy on pine, tin and pico.)
  • I decided to actually create and use limited-access users for the database calls (as one should) and then had a hell of a time ensuring they could connect to the MySQL Docker container.
  • Even with limited-access users being valid users, I couldn’t run a simple select statement.

All that’s been taken care of. Now it’s a matter of actually writing the code to get a question pulled from the database, displayed to the user and then matching their typed answer with the answer in the database. I gave it a couple of half-hearted attempts tonight, once I finally got one of my database users to properly make a select statement, but figured I’d accomplished enough.

A lot of it this weekend was making sure things were being done right. It’s hilarious how I’m still not to the point where I was when I was writing things with mysqli. Just need more time. This is not going to be simple and it’s not going to be solved quickly.

Speaking of “quickly”, the process of starting up my Docker containers is not so much with the speed. I obviously desperately need to update my computer, because there’s not a lot going on in that startup process, but it takes — and I timed it — upwards of eight minutes to get both the PHP and MySQL containers running. Now, this didn’t pose a huge problem in PHP II, because the containers were configured by our teacher, so we literally did docker-compose build and docker-compose up to start up and then docker-compose down when we were done. So it’s one thing to spend eight minutes or thereabouts waiting for your containers to come up when you do it once, but a whole other thing to do it numerous times in a day. Come to think of it, there’s probably a way to refresh the configuration/etc without killing the containers and starting anew, but that bears more investigation.

And speaking of refreshing configurations and such, I spent a couple of hours updating my IRC server, services and proxy monitor on Sunday. I’m a terrible person because I don’t update often and, when I do, it’s usually because a new major release has come out. As such, I generally have to start from scratch because various updates are incompatible with my existing  configuration file. But not this time! So I backed everything up (like, twice) and then proceeded to install over my IRC server with the new version and then restarted the server and that worked fine. Same with services. Same with the proxy monitor.

I’d set aside three hours for it and it barely took two — and that included all the backing up and reading I was doing to ensure I knew what the hell I was doing. It went so smoothly! I fully expect the earth to open up and swallow it, now.

And on that note, I should go to bed. Back to work tomorrow and I’ll be working from my air-conditioned living room instead of my non-air-conditioned office.

I’ll post some pics of my living room desk with and without my work laptop next time! I’m really loving how it’s turned out.

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Back to it?

Tonight, I spent a couple of hours playing with code for my game.

Not that I got particularly much done, mind you. Most of the time was spent flailing wildly on the command line, trying to remember the magical combination of words and characters to push something to GitHub, or remember how to connect to my Docker containers.

I’m trying to switch from using MySQLi to PDO for the database requests, as I’d mentioned back here. It’s the most robust method, especially when you use prepared statements. And, for my game, the majority of database calls will be to a question/answer database, so prepared statements make total sense because they’ll be reused a ton.

Programming is really a skill you need to practice to retain, just like any other language. It’s been about three months since I’ve done any kind of programming at all and more than that since I’ve touched PHP. So I am definitely out of practice and need to spend time working on that some more. So the PDO thing was what I wanted to tackle tonight. It didn’t happen. But I feel better for having tried out a few different options and learning from those attempts.

This weekend is a four-day weekend for me, thanks to a company-wide holiday on Friday and observing Canada Day on Monday. My goals include a lot of sleeping, some writing, some coding and a lot of sitting with my air conditioner on high. It’s supposed to be more than 40C (104F) with the humidity, so that’s disgusting. I love my city, but living in a place where it gets down to -40C and gets up to +40C is kind of stupid.

Anyway, it’s late, so I should get to bed. More updates as events warrant!

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Updates and such

First, the last two months of my life have been kind of hectic. I finished my courses. I went to Las Vegas. I went to Lake Tahoe. I came home and wanted to sleep forever… :) I had a birthday. All told, a whirlwind.

Things are calmer now, so I decided to buy a new desk. No, not for my home office, but for my living room. I’ve had this monstrous L-shaped desk with shelving and storage on the side of it for approximately forever. Like, 1999. It’s served me well. I remember putting it together in my bedroom in my parents’ house.

It came with me to my first apartment in 2001.

And my second apartment in 2002.

And, uh, I’m still here.

Basically, the desk hasn’t been touched (moved, emptied, etc) in 16 years. So I’ve spent the last two weekends emptying it and cleaning it, because I’m getting a new desk from IKEA (yes, the same Linnmon/Alex desk as in my office) and getting rid of this one.

Anyway, I’ve been deeply nostalgic as I go through everything from old cable and phone bills to old birthday cards from my grandmothers (both of whom have passed), from old photos to old tickets to the third Harry Potter, which I saw in freaking Newcastle, England.

And now everything is either thrown out (there was a lot) or stored (also a lot) or temporarily stored because I still need those items regularly.

Which leaves me with the desk.

Obviously, I have to move the computer stuff and lamp, which I’ll do on Wednesday, before dissembling the desk into its two major halves. It gets picked up on Thursday evening and the new desk arrives Friday afternoon. So next weekend will be me building another IKEA Linnmon/Alex desk.

I’ll miss the desk. I will. I’ve had so many memories at this desk, strange as it may seem. I’ve blackjacked people over the head in Thief, I’ve conquered worlds in Civilization V, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words here. I’ve defeated innumerable dungeons and raids and bosses in World of Warcraft, I’ve spent hours laughing as I recorded podcasts, even more hours editing those podcasts… I have spent a lot of time at this desk over the years.

And I know, it’s just a desk. It’s a piece of functional furniture that I picked out and bought and assembled almost two decades ago.

But the laughter and tears (don’t underestimate the emotions one can feel when writing or interacting with others online), the joy and sadness, the victories and defeats that have happened while seated at this desk are uncountably immense.

While I was going through All The Things, I found a ton of old CDs with lots of data on them, too. Old versions of this very website existed on these CDs, for example.

Also, old stories. Old photos. Even old videos. One day, I’ll try to pull some out and do something with them or whatever.

For now, I’ll sit here, lost in thought, overcome with memories and feelings from the last 19 years of my life.

Posted on by julie

That’s All, Folks!

It’s nearly 4am on Thursday, March 22nd, 2018.

I should be in bed.

But I just handed in my final JavaScript assignment and my brain is still whirring. Lots of things on my mind tonight-slash-this-morning, so I definitely need to let the brain settle a bit before I try to sleep for maybe five hours before I then work for 6-6.5 hours, before I then go to class.

It was sometime in, oh, June or July of 2016 that I said to myself, “Self, don’t you want to be more technical? Don’t you want to learn PHP?”

My job, at the time, was Head of Customer Success for a small Montreal-based startup and I was forever not quite understanding everything. Tokens? Authentication? PHP errors? Yeah, so it would have been useful, I thought, to learn PHP.

Surprisingly, I don’t learn amazingly well through online classes. Maybe I’m old-school — or just old! — but I need to be sitting in a classroom, listening to a teacher. I know, I know, silly. But still, it’s how I learn best. So I’d looked up what I needed to do at my old university’s Continuing Education department to get to PHP. Pre-requisites: Java Programming, SQL and HTML5/CSS3.

… yeah, so I said screw that. But by fall I’d been thinking about it more and more. I thought, at the minimum, maybe I’d just take the SQL class, just 20 hours or so of the course, one evening a week for a couple of hours, for ten weeks. So I signed up for the fall semester.

And then I saw that the HTML class, taught by my favourite teacher in ContEd, was available, so I swapped SQL for the winter semester, figuring I’d take HTML and update my skills. You know, learn about things like media queries and responsive webpages and maybe not use tables for layouts when I could use divs. It would be a good test for me to see if I could handle four hours of class once a week for ten weeks while juggling work, since it would be mostly a review for me.

Well, I got like 4-5 weeks into the class and then I got laid off at work. So I kept going with the classes. HTML and SQL were already paid for. So I kicked ass in HTML and did very well in SQL and then I took Java, which was so very, very painful, then PHP (with virtually no break in between), oh, and I started a new job in there. And then, finally, I had a bit of a break between PHP and PHP II.

Finished PHP II (it was an awesome class) and that left me with one class left to get a diploma: JavaScript & AJAX. So I took it this winter.

Really not a fan. hahaha.

I’m sleep-deprived and have an exam in, oh, under 14 hours, so that’ll be fun. But this is it. Unless my assignment is a failure (it isn’t), or unless I completely bomb the exam (I’m really hoping I won’t), I should be finished with JavaScript & AJAX after I write my exam tonight.

And with it, I’ll be done with my certificate in Front-End Web Development.

And with that, I’ll be done with my Diploma in Web Programming.

18 months after I started, I have learned an insane amount of stuff. A short list:

  • HTML5, CSS3 and media queries
  • SQL: creation of a database and database table, select statements, nested queries, all from the command line!
  • Java: my real intro to programming, with variables, conditional statements, for loops, data types (booleans, integers, floats, etc), use of NetBeans (ugh), keyboard buffers, regex, arrays, data validation, using database queries to pull an item from a database, object-oriented programming and the like.
  • PHP I: Basically, all the Java stuff but done in PHP, including some cool server stuff. Plus more MySQL.
  • PHP II: Man, where to even start? Docker and virtual containers, GitHub and the command-line interface, repos, pulling, pushing, fetching, etc, APIs, security, passwords and hashing, the cloud, indexing and search within MySQL, unit tests, stuff about composer… Honestly, I probably learned the most in this class and I loved it.
  • JavaScript & AJAX: Well, I can validate forms. haha. And make AJAX calls! And write stuff that’s very similar to Java and PHP within JavaScript. I had no idea it was so deep and complex and we didn’t even touch on frameworks.

I didn’t learn a ton of new stuff here, but it’s a 300-level class and PHP I is 400 and PHP II is 500, so I basically knew most of the stuff. But it’s always good to have it refreshed.

So tonight, after my exam, I’ll have completed 260 hours of class over six courses, in 18 months. I didn’t take any breaks, I just took one every semester until I was done.

Were I to do it over again, I’d book more time off of work for final projects/exam prep. Alas.

I plan to spend several months catching up on everything from sleep to TV shows, plus doing a lot of writing and some coding on the side. There is my game to write, after all!

I have deeper thoughts about this experience. I have more to say about how I feel after all of this.

But it’s 4:28am and I should wake up in about five hours. Maybe I’ll be even more loquacious next time.

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More complexities

Due to the fact I had a JavaScript midterm last week, I haven’t done any coding for my game project. That’s okay. This is not going to be something I’m going to hack out over the course of a week. Or a month. This is going to take a long, long time.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been doing some reading.

Let’s talk about usernames: Excellent read. Also, horrifying. As I was reading, I came across this line:

There’s our user table, there’s our unique username column. Easy!

That’s exactly what I was thinking. That’s how to make something unique, right?

And then I kept reading. Case-sensitivity, normalization, punycode, other alphabets… Also, single-script confusables (ie: a lower-case L and a number one and a capital i, l 1 I, all look ridiculously similar in many fonts. Is that a problem? And what about unique emails? Gonna have to take the + sign that Gmail allows and nuke everything after it to ensure true unique mails. Also, remove all periods in the email’s username portion. And what about names like “root” or “admin”? Probably should disallow those, too.

So that alone gets complicated.

Then I did some more reading about PHP web apps in particular, in terms of best practices, just to make sure I’m on the right page. This page, PHP Best Practices, is a great resource. It’s mostly in English, basically, which is useful. Or, at the very least, I can understand it. It also goes into detail about why or why you should not use a specific way of doing things.

So in terms of storing passwords, I’d been right — this resource recommends bcrypt hashing. That’s wonderful.

In terms of connecting to, and querying, a MySQL database, not do much. Turns out the method I hated most (PDO – PHP Data Objects) when learning is the newest and most robust method, particularly when using prepared statements. All of my testing code to date uses mysqli, so that’s something I need to rewrite to ensure it works okay.

So lots of reading and understanding done there and more to come, I’m sure.

In other news, I successfully installed a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate all by myself for one of my (many) domains. The only bummer is that they expire every three months. Still, refreshing them takes like, five minutes. So it’s not too bad. And it’s free! That’s one of my projects for this spring: Get all of my sites to be on SSL, using HTTPS, even though I basically don’t ask for any user information whatsoever. Why? Because Chrome is starting to list things as “insecure”. So that’s something to do.

Finally, in terms of work, can I just say how delightful it is to have a job that allows us to work flexibly? I was about an hour and change short of my 40 hours last week, so I made up the time this weekend. Of course, in making up the time this weekend, I actually worked for almost three hours. So because I worked an extra two hours or so, those are banked against next week’s time. Normally, I work 9-hour days on Mondays or Tuesdays (sometimes both) in order to make up for class on Thursday, but seems as though I won’t need to do so this week. And the bonus is, I’m all caught up on my own outstanding tickets. Whew.

All right, it’s now past midnight, so I should consider going to bed, now. Have an excellent week!

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Continuing Adventures in Coding

Well, it’s 12:43am on Wednesday, February 14 (… happy Valentine’s Day?) and I feel like a coding badass.

Why? Well, two reasons.

The first is that I was working on Tuesday and someone had a ticket open with me that was complaining that one of our plugins was forcing use of the http protocol, rather than the https protocol. And I’m like “pfft, no way,” so he sends me a video and shows me and I’m like… “whaaaat?”

So I went digging around on GitHub in the code.

Sure enough, in the abstract class file (which, in case you’re unaware, serves as a template, if you will), there was a reference to a variable for a base URL… which had http hardcoded as the protocol to use.

Now, that might not seem like a big deal, because so much of the web is insecure and has no real need to be secure. But we deal with ecommerce sites, so HTTPS is, more often than not, in use on these sites. So why on earth didn’t the developers use // as a protocol agnostic prefix to the base URL? No idea. Literally, no idea.

Of course, this was coming from me, with my whole entire 80 hours of PHP under my belt, so although that’s what it looked like to me, I wasn’t certain. I flagged it to a developer who took a look and said “great sleuthing!” and she pushed some changes which made it into the release that’s going out this week. I was so surprised that:

a) I was right

b) This code existed in the first place!

I mean, I haven’t done any secure sites ever, but I learned at my last workplace that one needs to account for whether or not the client will be using an SSL certificate, so you should always use // instead of specifying http or https. Makes sense. I checked the history and it appears that the two lines with http in them had been there since, oh, the start of the plugin. hahaha.

So, that’s one reason I feel like a coding badass.

The other is that, with a nudge from an online acquaintance, I managed to finish my JavaScript assignment in which I have to show the current time in six separate timezones: Houston, London, New York, Seattle, Sydney and Tokyo.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit, but I finally got it to work. The main issue was that I’d accidentally written newTime=newtime.settime(newvalue) instead of just newtime.settime(newvalue).  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The secondary issue was that my universaltime variable wasn’t going to GMT/UTC, for some reason, which ended up being “Julie, you’re stupid and altering the wrong variable before passing it back.”

Anyhow, my JavaScript assignment is now done and tomorrow night, I can actually study for my midterm on Thursday.

Just six more classes (including Thursday) before I’m done! And then maybe I can return my attention to my game.

No real updates there, although I now have figured out I’m probably just going to end up using bcrypt as my password hashing method. Literally, the only piece of personally-identifiable information I think I want to store that belongs to a user is an email address. No reason for anything else, so I don’t think I need to go all out for security. Still, I did a lot of research and reading and feel a lot more comfortable with what I’m going to be attempting here, at least when it comes to users.

Okay, it’s getting late and I should be up in about 8 hours to work, for eight hours, and then study for the rest of the evening.

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Oh, the complexities!

It occurred to me today that if I’m going to build a game that I expect other people to play, that they’re going to have to log in to… I’m going to need an SSL certificate.

That’s down the road, of course, but it would be foolish to have any data transferring between individuals and my site without using the HTTPS protocol.

That’s not the only complexity. I was thinking about how to best go about a registration/login process and it dawned on me — I need to figure out password hashing, salting and that kind of stuff. I already know stuff like “md5 is bad” and we used bcrypt in my PHP II class, in conjunction with the password_hash function which (when using PHP 7, which I am) adds a salt. But is that going to be enough? My reading suggests yes, but it’s still not fully solidified in my head, so more reading is required.

Additionally, password resets! My reading recommends a one-time, short-expiry token to allow people to log in from the email sent out to them. While I think I know how to pull that off, thanks to PHP II, I suspect this is going to be a pain. Still, I want to make certain that people’s accounts aren’t easily compromised, so I’m inclined to spend more time than less when it comes to this kind of thing.  And I’ll need more time because all of this is also still fuzzy in my head.

Still, in order to make any kind of forward progress in terms of gameplay, I need to make sure I have a login functioning properly, even if I don’t do a registration yet and just populate the user table with a couple of user accounts when I spin up my Docker containers. That means I definitely need to get the password hashing stuff figured out and understood properly before I implement something. Then, maybe I can move forward in the rest of things.

I knew this was going to be a hell of a big project to undertake. I may have underestimated it a little bit. Still, all of this learning is pretty great. More of it to come, clearly.

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Project update!

It’s me again! I know! It’s shocking. It’s only been a few days since my last post and yet, here I am!

I started playing around with some code for my game.

I was planning all kinds of things out (oh god, the things I’m going to have to do!) and I suddenly was consumed, paralyzed, with this fear: what if I can’t even do the basic stuff I think I know how to do???

For me, the basic stuff is the questions and answers of the trivia portion of the game, which will be the majority of it. While I was thinking about the game itself, I was like “yeah, sure, I know how to pull a single row from a database!” and “yeah, sure, I know how to pull something from the resulting array!” and “pfft, how hard could it be to make it a random question?”

So I decided to dive into it. It’ll all need to be rewritten, of course, because it needs to be built within the game’s framework and right now it exists on a trivia-test.php page (and a private GitHub repo, thank you for loving students like you do!), so it’s messy. But it works. I can randomly pull out a row from the question database. And I can display the question to the user. And I can take the user input and transpose it all to lowercase, then match that to the answer in the database (which is all lowercase) and I do that because, that way, OTTAWA, Ottawa, OtTaWa and ottawa are all valid answers to the question of What is the capital city of Canada?

So I can do this. I can actually do this. And man, that’s super exciting.

I’m still working on the narrative for the story (my friend Lisa is helping me). I’m also still working on the gameplay itself, since it’s still kind of fuzzy, and I’m picking my friend Andrew’s brain about that, since he has probably played more games than anyone else I’ve ever met. My brother insists there be a fishing component to the game and it does make sense, so I’m thinking that there will be a side-quest to level your fishing skill and such. My brother’s going to help me with ideas for how that should go, too.

The coolest part of this so far, apart from realized I can do this, has been figuring out how to organize the databases. I really liked SQL when I took it last winter, and I enjoyed using it in Java class and through PHP. I am not, by any means, an expert, but I really kind of dig SQL. I’m more comfortable on the command line, owing to how I learned, I guess. It’s fun. It’s cool to be able to use Docker to build my database when I restart my environment and I love being able to basically ssh into the container on the gitbash command line and test stuff in there. It’s fun and challenging. Will my alter table command work? Will this command retrieve what I need it to? It’s awesome when it does.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to be like yeahhhhhh! More to come, I’m sure.

Posted on by julie · 2 Comments

A Crazy Idea

Oh, hello! Didn’t expect to see me so early in the new year, did you? It’s only been about five weeks since my last post, so I know, this is weird. ;)

I passed PHP II. Not only that, I kind of did pretty well. I nailed a bunch of stuff on my final project and am still feeling pretty good about that. I saw The Last Jedi with my brother and his friend A on December 15th. Afterwards, we stopped in at our parents’ house, where my brother would have dinner with them and his wife and the two kids, while I… had to go home and code until my fingers bled. So I bounced my youngest nephew on my knee for a bit, squeezed the eldest in a hug, then headed back home.

It all started to just click for me. I would have passed, if I’d handed things in as they were. But it would have been something like a 65% or something and that would have stuck in my craw. So I was thrilled when things just started to click and I was able to build out a lot of the required functionality that, to that point, hadn’t been working right for me. At the risk of sounding cliché, the force was strong with me that night and I finished the class with an 87%.

So that was a relief, but I also felt like I learned a lot of lasting knowledge in PHP II — and not just PHP stuff, either. We’re talking stuff like gitbash, git, Docker, containers, APIs, JSON, all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty cool and I’m so glad I learned that along with the PHP stuff I learned.

And now, JavaScript & AJAX has begun.

Once I’m done with this, by the end of March, I’ll have my Diploma in Web Programming. That represents 260 hours of class alone. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve slaved over this material outside of class, but it was easily as much time in class for each — if not more, especially in the case of Java. So we’re looking at about 520 hours, if not more, working through HTML/CSS, SQL, Java, PHP and now JavaScript and AJAX.

I can’t wait to be done and reclaim any portion of my free time again. ;)

And speaking of free time, I have a crazy idea.

I spent a lot of time playing on the computer as a kid. A lot. Not a lot playing triple-A games or first-person shooters or whatever (although there were a ton of games from Sierra and such, of course). No, what I spent probably way too much time doing as a kid was calling in to local Bulletin Board Systems and writing on message boards and playing online games. I spent what must be years of my life playing Trade Wars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, which were two of the most popular BBS door games that existed.

Another one I loved was written by a friend of mine. It was called Sky Mountain. The goal was to climb to the peak of the mountain, at 241,000 feet, but you had to mind the Sky Lord and the other climbers on the mountain. The way you climbed the mountain was by answering trivia questions. (Or was that how you gained health? Magic? Whatever, trivia questions were vital.)

So I’m going to take my neophyte PHP skillz and create a web-based game. Details are very fuzzy right now, but I’m planning on a game that harkens back to Sky Mountain in that it has a lot of trivia in it, which will, naturally, be vital to game progression. I’m hoping to have over 4000 questions to start with, in a ton of categories, and I also hope to have a reasonable mechanism to prevent duplicate questions (outside of just having a metric assload of questions to draw from). We’ll see how that goes, since, you know, I’m going to write all these questions myself. While I’m sure that there are open-source trivia databases out there, if this is my game, it’s going to be my game, at least for the content. Some of the questions will be easy to come up with — periodic table stuff, for example, or capital cities. Stuff about geography, music, religion? All a little more difficult.

So that’s my plan for basically the rest of the year. My goal is to have a working beta by late September. Of course, I can’t dedicate much time to it right now because of class, and I do have a full-time job (which I love) and I do have at least a couple of trips happening this year, plus there’s National Novel Writing Month in November… It’s going to be challenging for sure, but I’m really looking forward to taking all the stuff I’ve learned (and will be shortly learning) and incorporating it into a real, actual project.

I’ll be sure to check in again before JavaScript/AJAX ends!