It’s not a secret that I am a movie nut. I visit the cinema a dozen times a month, and watch BluRay and DVD movies at home more regularly than going to the toilet.

To keep track of the movies I’ve watched, I started to keep an HTML file with all the movies, including a rating. I also rate the movies on IMDb, but their presentation sucks. Here is my list: http://movies.arjaneising.nl/.

After a while, I got sick of copy pasting everything. So I created a PHP web app including a small back-end to manage all the movies. I sent it to a few college mates, who installed it on their servers. I got some feedback, and improved it a bit.

Today, I made the full version publicly available on this website. I also pushed it to Github, so you can fork it yourself and play with it.

Also note that it’s postcardware, please send me a postcard from your home country if you like it!

Today it is Blog Action Day. One day to think about the environment. To think about what you can do for a better environment, even if it is a bit, since a better environment starts with yourself. The color green plays an important role in this, since almost everybody associates it with a better environment.

In the development of a web site green also plays a quite important role. Some people live for the green bar the W3C markup validator shows when a web page validates. The green color indicates everything is good, and that is also what a better environment is. Unfortunately nothing can be validated on how good they are for the environment, even web sites not.

Another green aspect of web development are Microformats. Microformats help people and computers interact with each other much easier, they are more balanced. Thinking about the environment also about getting a better balance between you and everything around you.

For the server-side programmers, I have this one: PEAR. Their web site is green, but that’s not the only equality between PEAR and a better environment. PEAR allows every developer to share and grab code others developed. Developers can learn and safe time by looking at code by others, or be nice for colleague developers by sharing their code. A greener world also is good for others, and people can learn from nature in many ways.

I almost forgot graphic designers. It’s a fact a higher percentage of the designers uses an Apple Mac. So it is good to know Apple was tackled down by Greenpeace to build greener Apples. It is a result of the Green My Apple website.

Concluding I can say web designers and developers can help the world to be much greener. If you have more ideas, I would love to hear: just drop a comment.

Lately I’ve been working on some group projects, and I had the idea to make a tool to report bugs, errors and other unwanted things on a web site. So I made that tool, and now it is time to share it with the world.

I made a page in my codex for the BugReporter. There you can find info for implementing the tool in you project (it’s quite easy), as well as a demo.

The tool is written in JavaScript, and the server-side script in PHP, but that can be changed in any other server-side language as you want. Nice features are making the bug-window transparent (double-click), and the AJAX transport of the data to the server. It is also very small, only a few kilobytes.

So, if you’re working on a group project, say more than three people, this might be useful.

The day before yesterday Acunetix warned us that 70 percent of all web sites has security leaks. SQL injection is favorite, so what to do about that?

Rick posted a nice PHP function to secure your incoming variables. Unfortunately it is an image, but that doesn’t oppress our happiness, does it?

Months ago I begun with a project: learn Mambo. The first horrible problem came in a few minuets: the code was bad. The second followed soon: all the output was hard-coded in the Mambo core components.

But finally: this (Dutch) result came around: Stichting Jazz In Groningen.