Tutorial Seek Development Blog

Today was the big day.  Everyone at school had their personal projects waving them around at others.  Showing off, while some hurried to Desmond’s class to put them away.

People liked the post that I brought, they were quite interested in what the project was about and I tried to shed as little details as possible.

I needed to get my project turned in before the bell had rung, so me and a couple of friends headed to Mr. D’s class about 10-15 minutes prior and dropped our things off.  His first period class sure was happy cause they could socialize because he was busy taking care of our questions and other rants that we had.

The Bell rung and we were still in his class, so he said he would write us some passes.  It would of been impossible to make it across campus and not get internal suspension for being late.  When we heard that, we just took our sweet ole time.

I finally got the paper work out of my hands, and I told him that the website would be launching for the upcoming 07 year, that being so that it could be presented at the MYP Showcase in the upcoming months.

Resources that were used in order to complete the project were some of the most trusted sources to get information for references and common debugging issues.  These websites hold documentation of some of the programming languages that were used in the development of Tutorial Seek and provide adequate information to all.

1. www.google.com
2. www.apache.org
3. www.mysql.com
4. www.php.net
5. www.pixel2life.com
6. www.quirksmode.org
7. www.w3schools.com

Tutorial Seek will be the world’s first Tutorial Indexing Search Engine. With an automated submission process, it brings a website always pouring out with fresh learning documents and content that is guiding the members of today’s community to the ones of tomorrow. The concept of having a webmaster only submit a website to the database will relieve a lot of stress on those who want to get visitors to read more of their articles. By providing content for the people of interest, they will need people to read them in order to keep a solid desire to want to learn more and to be the writers of the newest tutorials to the community they are supporting.

This project has improved my skills as a developer and will hopefully continue to raise the bar on my future releases and projects. Coming up with ideas that aren’t taking by the ever changing world wide web is sometimes hard, but taking suggestions and dreams that people have, and twisting them to create a solution for everyone, including yourself is rewarding in the long run.

From the feedback given by the community that has had a little taste of that the Seek Bot will offer webmasters and myself alike, they are curious to how it will work, and yet excited to try it out and see what it is like for themselves. It is expected to be a huge success and will continue to grow to be a very recognized website. Of course marketing the website for it to be known throughout many other sites relating to tutorials will be another project of interest, it will be considered to drive the website to the best that it can be.

Looking back on the first day that I actually started to work on the project, organizing ideas and concepts that kept flowing through my mind and writing them down on the process journal, to the expected launch date and management of the upcoming site, I have to say that I am very satisfied with the finished product. It is well original, simple and clean and to be very pleasing to the new generation of tutorials and tutorial indexing, that is – Tutorial Seek.

Through Approaches to Learning, new ideas and thoughts have been able to filter through my project.  I have had to come up with new themes and concepts to resolve a problem and create a new interface for which my applications were to be incorporated.  An algorithm was necessary for Seek Bot to work, a bunch of math functions and simple problem solving to determine and weigh tutorials based on how much views they are given by the tutorial index itself, and even how high they rank compared to the rest of the website.  Even though I have mastered the languages necessary to process the project, there were times where I needed to do some Research and Development of my own in which to test things that I have not learned, coming up with new logic and putting it together until it worked and to understand how that works and to comprehend why it does not work.  To use libraries and extensions for my server environments, in which made distant dreams closer to the home plate of reality.

Creating any learning resource and an extensive tutorial library for readers gives a complete and fulfilling sense of Community and Service.  It may not be to the local community and neighborhood in your city, but it is the online community accessible to anyone in the world at any time they please.  A tutorial index is primarily a website that creates a library of tutorials on other websites, so that a reader, who is looking for a specific topic, can query the database of many tutorials instead of looking on many other sites for that one tutorial.  It makes it easier as a central learning environment, like your own public library.

Creating your own website already falls in the category of Homo Faber.  Tutorial Seek was developed and coded from simple files on the every day server, to a complete user application interface.  Managing the project on my own was something as tedious as a one man team building a space rocket.  Now that an every day computer user can setup their own web page on Google, only the best of the best can really produce a website in which people will look at in aw, and wonder how it works.  Tutorial Seek is an example of one of those websites, one that will stand out from the normal pile, not only was it coded by one person, but it was coded with the intention of every line that powers each web page to be unique from any other website on the net.

Being a professional web developer for the past 2 years has thought me many things such as patience, and the common logic that is used in developing even the most complex applications.  It has grown into a passion now, something that I love to do and enjoy.  Having this natural inspiration for this field, it was easy to get into the groove and mood necessary to build and complete the massive website.  A simple saying “Code is Poetry” can be used to describe the concept of programming.  It goes over many revisions, certain parts which needs more emphasizing than others, double checked over and over for grammatical errors and irrational key points which aren’t necessary and only cause complications.  That is what a true programmer is all about.

Every project will encounter problems that need to be resolved in order to proceed.  At one point or another, there are things that need to be coded, but there is no way that you know how to put this into pure logic.  You can think it out on paper and in your head, but you cannot put parts of it together.  Things like these are eventually accomplished by taking the problem from a different angle and starting over from a safe point.

Many decisions were necessary in order to complete Tutorial Seek.  I had to outsource designers and artists that could deliver a product in a very professional manner that is visually pleasing to most crowds and catchy to keep the users from revisiting the page.  Not only did they have to have skills and talent, but their price had to be reasonable so that I would get the most for my money.