Webblie.com – PHP5 Site

I wrote this entry close to 2am so i made no sense now that I read it. This is more of a technical background on how webblie.com works and why I went the path I chose.

Technology

Webblie.com was built using PHP 5 and MySQL as a non-volatile data storage medium. Given that I chose PHP5 to build the system I chose Java to create my spiders, a total of 5 spiders and 2 web miners. I also did not create a typical architected solution to the initla release of the application, yes there is a reason for this. You will not find the Zend Framework or any other OO feature in the system in the initial release.

I chose the non structured road because I wanted to test the load a typical PHP application can take. According a few architects I’ve spoken to myspace is such a application but unfortunately there are no figures to view and analyze. The second version of the application, webblie.com, will be based off the Zend Framework and ab test will be done on all pages to compare with the initial figures.

Along with the bulk of the system which are the spiders I made a myspace like system which includes, user profile pages (not too flashy at the moment but meet my requirements). The user profile pages allow users to upload avatars, comment on each others profile pages, receive invites, and look at each others maps which is powered by yahoo maps and my own cron job which fetches geo data on a nightly bases.

Spiders

As mentioned above the site is powered by web spiders. On my off-time, when ever that is, I write spider for people. So I’ve accumulated a collection of these small virtual insects. The spiders crawl popular sites, and other spiders link information from other sites to form a profile. Dont worry I don’t try to say this is my content. I made sure to place the logo of the site I crawled.

The spiders are built using HTTPUnit, and my own data mining API which extracts data, cleans data, and analyzes data I need.

Why the project

A few months ago I started to find out that I had relatives in Florida, then people started to ask me, “Hey!…You!….are Phillipino?” It turned out Padilla is a common last name in the Philippines and my family migrated to Florida not to long ago. That started this endless course to track down all the Padillas around the world.

Armando Padilla On my new site www.webblie.com