David Turner

A Tip of the Hat (to Awesome Resources)

Well, #IMD is now pretty much over for those of us in final year. It's been a great, if stressful, time for me and it'll be nice to finally unwind over the next few days before getting back to work on ReferenceIt for final submission.

I'd love to say that I'm entirely responsible for the sheer awesome that my site consists of, but it would be a lie. Over the past year I've read an insane amount of material both on and offline. And in this post I'm going to go over some of the best resources I've found and made use of over the past year.

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Securing User Data

When it comes to creating a web application it's vital that user information is secure. If it isn't then people's faith in both you and your work will plummet. As I'm developing my own application from scratch, this is a very important aspect of my code to get right, and a very difficult thing to do correctly.

I'm going to be taking a look at some of the research I've done with regards to securing user information, covering things like how best to hold data like user passwords, as well as some of the techniques you can use to do so effectively and securely.

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Making Decisions & Adapting Plans

Last Semester I spoke about my plans for my Major Project. One of the things I wanted to do was make use of a PHP Framework. I talked about the different options that were available to me, before settling upon Yii.

Over the past few weeks it has become blatantly obvious that trying to pick up the ropes of a PHP Framework isn't something that I should be doing over the course of a single semester, as evidenced by the lack of development being posted on this site of over on ReferenceIt itself. Don't worry though folks, I have a plan.

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Breaking Down a Reference

Referencing... Have you ever sat down and taken a look at just how much actually goes into creating one? Over the past week I have been looking into what exactly makes up a Harvard Reference. Turns out that there's a lot to creating a reference.

Referencing different types of media requires a pretty wide selection of elements. These are needed to cover all of the possibilities that exist for the different types of references both commonly, and uncommonly, made use of in research and documentation.

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Signing On & Signing Up

After a restful break between Semesters 1 and 2 it looks like I'm back, and straight back into the thick of things. Whilst I've been taking time out I've not been neglecting my project, taking time to organise things and unwind after a stressful first semester. I have a feeling that this semester is going to be piling on the stress from the get go.

So now that I'm back I need to get things going with my Major Project, ReferenceIt. The first step of this is going to be providing a way for people to keep abreast of what is happening with the project, closer to the launch of the site. An ideal solution to this is creating a mailing list. As an added bonus this gives me a way to measure interest in my work, and gives me a way to reward early adopters by giving them early access to the site.

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