Proverbs Web Calendar 2.1

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Monday, August 17. 2009

Proverbs Web Calendar 2.1

Sometime around the end of 2001 I volunteered myself to write a script for team NHB's website, which was the Half-Life TFC clan that I competed with at the time. The web server the script would be running on was Linux based, thus the script had to be written in PHP and capable of using text files or a mySQL database to store the information. It was to be used to show the team's schedule for practices, competitions, etc. I suppose Perl was an option at the time, but even in 2001 PHP was a phenomenal programming language.

That script eventually became the Proverbs Web Calendar 1.0 and was released publicly Dec 31, 2001 on the Proverbs, LLC website; back then located at www.proverbs.biz. After a few updates, one major security flaw, and a few bug fixes over the course of several months, something I was definitely not expecting happened: the calendar became a popular download. Immensely popular.

At the time, around May of 2002, the websites touting the "most popular web event calendar" were bragging about 10,000+ downloads per year. Five months after the initial release and I was seeing 5000+ downloads a month, not to mention being inundated with questions, comments and suggestions from users of the calendar. I was particular amazed at the number of overseas users that were writing to me for help or with suggestions.

All of those suggestions, a few code snippets other developers submitted and some modifications of my own became Proverbs Web Calendar 2.0, released in December of 2004. This was a complete rewrite of the prior web calendar and was one of my first attempts at using classes in PHP. Thanks to the suggestions and help from a couple Dutch and German college students, this was also my first foray into a multilingual application.

Here we are over four years since I last touched the web calendar and almost eight years since its inception. In all that time the calendar has been downloaded over 200,000 times, been ported by other developers to additional platforms and toolkits, as well as having been outright stolen and rebranded by a few other companies. To my surprise it is still downloaded on a regular basis and I continue to receive the occasional question or two regarding the calendar; mostly having to do with the calendar not working correctly with newer web browsers and CSS2.

On that note, everyone will be happy to know that I finally got off my ass and took a look at the code this past weekend. A few tweaks here, a couple rewrites there, a new file or two, the removal of a couple files and for the first time in four years there is a new version released. Not wanting to load my computer down with a ton of different Internet browsers, I only tested with IE6, IE8 and FF3.5. I imagine the calendar should, once again, behave correctly with the majority of modern browsers, but let me know if you hit any problems (I am aware FF3.5 scrolls too far in the schedule page, but that is a FF issue with CSS2).

Anyway, I now proudly present the Proverbs Web Calendar version 2.1. Enjoy.
Posted by
Andrew Maxim
in Tech at 07:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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