CBS purchased CNet Networks Inc today for $1.8 billon. You can add this to the list of large purchases by big businesses out there. It seems many companies are making ’strategic acquisitions’ of online services or businesses in order to boost their overall revenue. News Corp bought Myspace for $580 million a few years back and then Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and then DoubleClick for $3.1 billion (just to name a few). Those three purchases, I believe, were great decisions on behalf of the, now, parent companies. But why CNet, CBS? They’ve been around for over a decade! The three aforementioned companies were youngins when they were bought out and were doing quite well at the time. Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy reading news on CNET. I just don’t understand how they can be worth $1.8 billion.

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As though Myspace didn’t have enough revenue they recently won a judgement against notorious spammers in the amount of $230 million. Personally I’m quite happy about this for a few reasons. The main reason is that this (hopefully) will make other spammers shy away from this type of behavior. I’m guessing that the spammers who think they’re ‘really good’ will just try to be better and get around this mess anyways. Either way, perhaps there will be less of the scantily clad ladies I’ve never met asking me to befriend them on Myspace. 
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Since my younger years I have had some random and quite funny sleep ‘walking’ experiences. They seemed to have dissipated with the years I have gained and my wife hasn’t experienced too many odd things. I do talk in my sleep here and there - but most of the time the words don’t come together to make much sense. Well the other night I apparently woke up my wife by throwing the covers off of myself then leaned over the edge of the bed (sitting up) and started pilfering through ‘things’ on the floor. My wife asked me what I was doing and immediately laid back down and got back under the covers. I continued to mutter some sentences quietly and my wife caught onto what was going on in my dream. It appears I was looking for my PHP files on the floor. Now I obviously wouldn’t put them there regularly…but it seems that I thought they were there the other night.

PHP has made it into my dreams. Interesting.

Introduction

Through my work in web development I’ve noticed the high number of times I need to write out a contact or registration form for a client. Each time I get the form fields together and then decide how I want to process the form. This usually entails a client-side validation of certain fields (required fields, email validation, etc) and then a back-end check of those fields before processing them. This process can get pretty repetitive if you do a high volume of projects or sites needing this function. I was looking for a way to process any form I create with the same script each time and thus produced this php script. It’s a lightweight, single file form processor that has a number of options. The goal of this script is to provide a single file resource available to use over and over. For certain forms you may want to implement your own client-side validation of fields before sending them to the form processor. Let’s explore the features:

Features

• A single php file inspects form data and displays it to the user for review. Upon review the user can print and/or submit the results once all fields are valid (as discussed below)
• Can submit results to 1 or more email accounts
• Email results can be plain text or HTML formatted
• Script can be used in a standalone environment or as a part of your existing site template
• You can define which fields are required
• You can define which fields (if any) should not be displayed back to the user when they check the results before submission
• Checks for validity of email address (to confirm it is, in fact, an email address)

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Ideal Design Firm proudly launched the new Oceanfront Cottage Rentals, LLC website Wednesday of this week. Their site was originally managed in a page by page fashion using Frontpage. The new design was primarily done by my business partner and our lead designer Bill. I constructed the back-end with the exception of the javascript library ‘Script.aculo.us’. We initially started the project in late last year but it was put on hold temporarily. We picked it back up a couple of months ago and the big launch came yesterday. It’s been a fun journey designing and developing a custom rental management system for them.

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I’ll get my portfolio moved over sometime this week. Until then just check it out at erikreagan.net.

Hello to the fabulous world of blogging!

For some time I have been considering blogging. I’ve had erikreagan.com for about 5 years now and I haven’t really kept up content in about 4 years. A few months ago the desire to blog started to grow considerably. Not only is it a great way to share with others but it is a great way to meet other’s interested in similar fields as myself. I have numerous interests but I have managed to narrow my (initial) blogging down to a few areas. Allow me to expand…

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