I’ve been wanting to make a simple script that was entirely self-contained for a while now, but I haven’t been sure on exactly what I wanted to do. Something I’ve done more times than I care to count is write code that reads a directory and displays the files in some form or fashion. It’s something I know inside and out so I figured why not make a directory listing script that uses icons to represent individual file types and embed those images into the script itself. So I started coding.

A few hours later I had an embarrassingly polished script I felt deserved it’s own page. I’ve commented the code as thoroughly as possible, but if you have any questions please ask below.

Project Page: Greg-J.com/phpdl
Demo URL: PHPDL
Download: phpdl.zip

Warning: If this post sounds much more sinical than usual, it’s because the lack of attention this particular area of software has received from the OS community is unacceptable and half-arsed attempts make it all the more frustrating.

While I’m intrigued with the possibilities a social network script built on WordPress MU could potentially offer, I find the overall goal and ambition of the BuddyPress project completely underwhelming. A FOSS social network sounds great - since a decent open source solution for social networks simply doesn’t exist yet (note: the one that had the most chance was phpizabi, but the project died over a year ago. Probably because it’s complete crap) - but I’m failing to see the point of BuddyPress. If I’m going to start a social network with even a mediocre feature set, BuddyPress isn’t going go get me there.

I’m going to hold off final judgment until 1.0 ships, but at this point I’m less enthused than I was when I first found I’d be able to make a social network with BuddyPress.

Criticism is no good unless it’s constructive, but there isn’t enough of the project finished for me to go there. I know all to well how much can change between a day before release and release do, so when you’re as far out as they are from a final product there’s conjecture. My advice at this point would simply be “focus on making the site more interactive”.

I’ll check in when they launch along with every other blogger in the world and set up a test site. I’m mostly looking forward to releasing a free buddypress theme (it’ll exist when the theme exists) based on a social network design I’ve had finished for a while now though. I may begin work on it before completion actually, so stay tuned.

So this is kind of cool. SkeletonCMS has been included on OpenSourceCMS.com.

I’ll definitely have to spend some time to flesh it out, but since it’s an official OSS project, those of you who would like to contribute to the Skeleton flat file CMS please leave me a message.

You know when you start off reading your morning feeds and happen to click on a link, then another, then you have no idea how you got to the site you ended up at but you’re glad you did? Such is the case with todays afternoon dose of rss for me and it landed me on everystockphoto.com. This site is awesome. Think iStockPhoto without the i - that is if i somehow stood for “costs money”…

I’m a big fan of rss. I’ve probably racked up about 100 hours in developing test sites and services in the past two months that are based on rss. I’m guessing the people behind everystockphoto.com feel the same way because that’s how this site works. See, they don’t actually host these images. They’re (presumably) getting feeds from many different sites that offer photos with royalty free licensing - such as Flickr, stock.xchg and a slew of other sites I’ve never heard of - and creating the worlds largest free photo database. Needless to say, it’s awesome.

I’m not offended easily nor do I find anything offensive about the naked human body. Most of us creative types aren’t. But if you are, careful what you search for. Tons of naked people from tasteful black and whites to dongtastic (awesome word, no?) snapshots of naked buddies in the surf grace the pages. This probably isn’t worth the mention but putting naked people in the title got a lot of you to click the link so I owed it to you.

I’d love to round this out with a half dozen or so more free sites, but the community at MySpacePros.com has spent the last year doing that for us. If you want the most comprehensive list of designer resources check out the Design Resources thread at MSP.