As seems to happen to me a lot these days, I ran out of pages when writing my Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL book (the publisher assigns a fixed cap on the number of pages). There was just more content that I wanted to put into the book than the book had room for. In fact, there was more content that I had actually written, had edited, and turned into a PDF, than there was room for! The book’s loss is your reward: I’ll give away that extra content here, for free. Although anyone who has or has not read the book is welcome to download the following PDF, it won’t be that useful if you don’t also have the book (and, therefore, its code).

The first extra bit represents five pages intended for the end of Chapter 5, “Managing Site Content”. Chapter 5 is the penultimate chapter for the first example site and these pages discuss a number of ways you can alter the example. Some of the extra code and extra SQL discussed in this PDF is already available for download from the book’s pages on this site.

Welcome to my new Web site, LarryUllman.com! This site is intended to replace my previous site, www.DMCInsights.com. To accomplish that goal, I’ve imported all of the existing blog content into this new layout, plus added all of the content from the DMCInsights.com main page. The transition did not go as smoothly as I would have liked, but I think the site is working well enough to proceed (plus, I’m a bit impatient). There are still some kinks and quirks to work out, but hopefully you should be able to find and do what you need. If you have any problems or questions, just let me know. Thanks!

For quite some time, at least a year or more, I’ve been meaning to redo my company’s Web site ( www.larryullman.com). Sadly, even though I largely write about and do Web development, my own site is always the last one that I work on. Now that I’m between books, I actually have the time to get to my own neglected site. I’m happy to say that the new version of the site will go live this weekend, but there’s more. First, a little background…

Digital Media and Communications Insights, Inc., the company that I work for, and am a very minor owner of, was founded by my in-laws as a vehicle for my father-in-law’s telecommunications consultancy. In 1999, I started by own “branch” of the company, doing primarily Web development, training/teaching, and, of course, writing. In the past decade, my father-in-law retired and although I sometimes hire individuals for project work, yours truly is the company’s only true employee today. Thanks to the success of my books, and later the blog, the Web site gets a decent amount of traffic (north of one million hits per month), and I think it is safe to say that pretty much no one cares who or what DMC Insights is. Visitors want to download the code for a book, visit the support forum, email me, and maybe even hire me to work for them, but the existence of DMC Insights really doesn’t factor into the equation. In revamping my company’s Web site, I’ve often considered dropping the company facade and just putting my name front and center (my apologies if any of this sounds egotistical). Serendipitously, the domain name www.larryullman.com just became available this month, after being owned for the past ten years by a Canadian gentleman, named…Larry Ullman. I am now the proud owner of my namesake domain and have been busy creating a new look for it. The new version of the site is now ready to go (or ready enough!), so this weekend I’ll be instituting redirects on www.larryullman.com to direct all traffic there (unfortunately, half a million books are in print with my company’s URL on them). Hopefully this will be a smooth process, but there will inevitably be something that I missed.

In a very surprising and frustrating turn of events tonight, I used WordPress’s Export feature to export all the existing posts and comments so that I may import them into the blog to be used by my new site. Somehow, the process of exporting the records wreaked havoc on the series system, so the series feature doesn’t currently work (and it’s not working in the new system either). So I’m trying to get that fixed in the new site, which will go online in a day or two anyway. In the meantime, here are links to the first articles in the four series I’ve created:

• Introduction to jQuery
• Learning the Yii Framework
• Understanding MVC

I apologize for the inconvenience.

In conjunction with Adobe MAX 2010, which just wrapped up in Los Angeles, Adobe has announced the release of version 2.5 of Adobe AIR. The most significant addition in version 2.5 is the ability to create applications that will run on the Android platform (i.e., mobile devices). Using AIR, you can now create applications to be sold through the Android Market.

AIR version 2.5 also has support for some TVs and a couple of added desktop application features.

In conjunction with Adobe MAX 2010, which just wrapped up in Los Angeles, Adobe has announced the new features planned for the next release of Flash Builder, code named “Burrito”. As mentioned previously, the next release of the Flex SDK, code named “Hero”, focuses on mobile devices, and so does this next release of Flash Builder. In it, you’ll be able to designate a project as being for the mobile platform, meaning that Flash Builder will recommend the newer mobile-targeted components, when appropriate. The Flex-based applications will be able to run on supported (i.e., non-Apple) mobile devices through the Adobe AIR platform.

Secondary additions to Flash Builder include improved workflows and performance.