I just published a new version of software for the Medical Passport. This version (v1.3.0) has a number of new features.

• Easy Saving - The sofware no longer requires you to click a button to save your information. This helps prevent losing your information beacuase you forget to press the save button.
• Prefered Medical Facility - In your personal information you can have a preferred medical facility. This shows up in the summary.
• Dentist - Under the physicians there is now a place to add a dentist.
• Charting - This is much improved and pulls in more information for doctors to easily start and finish a chart.

There are other small bugs that were fixed plus small other enhancements that have been taken care of, but this software is turning out to be a great asset to doctors and patients alike.

I have been working on the new PlasmaCAM site for awhile. It employs a number of technologies.

The home page was made using Flash. We made sure and added links at the top and bottom for SEO value. The home navigation of the slides were done using Actionscript 3. All the slides are called from a loading php page in Actionscript, and all the slides are separate SWF files. This allows the ability to create a new SWF file and ‘plug it in’ easily without making any changes to the loading SWF file or the php code.

The rest of the site is database content driven. This is going to allow the ability to change text without going into the html and changing it. It is the step PlasmaCAM needed in separating the content from the style.

Other parts of the site, such as the owners community, uses jQuery and ajax functions to save user data and perform client validation.

So far the result are favorable, the conversion rate has almost doubled and the length of visit has gone up by almost a minute. This has been pretty consistent as it was launched at the end of November.

Ive written ajax request the long handed way using the long hand way of a XMLHttpRequest. It can be tedious and frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, it works great but building this functionality can take a long time, just to avoid a page refresh.

This is where jQuery comes in handy. In a few lines of javascript you can create quick ajax requests. This is how its done:

1. Download the jQuery library and include this file in your head tag like so.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”path-to-file/jquery.js”></script>

2. Create a php file that will be called and return value to the DOM. This can be a simple file that echos ‘Hello World’.

3. Create a page element that receives the markup. Here would be an example:

<div id=”loadedContent”></div>

4. Now that you have a php file that returns content, and a page element that can recieve the content you can now create the javascript/jQuery to make the ajax request and input the results into the DOM.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function () {
$.post(”hello-world.php”, function(data){
$(”#loadedContent”).html(data);
});
});
</script>

That’s it! On the page load it should request the page. You can go further by using simple click events and send simple name/value pairs using the same request. jQuery is simple and easy to use. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

Just released! I just finished developing a new version of the Medical Passport. This new version adds charting to the Passport formally called Electronic Medical Record. So in short, if you are away from home, and something happens, a new doctor can create a chart that is stored on your medical drive. Then when you get back to your doctor, he/she can see exactly what another doctor has done or given you. I am continuing to develop for Essential Medical and there are some new and exciting things coming up that should be a great asset for the medical community. See the features of the EMR HERE

I have had an interest in affiliate sites for the last few years and its looking more appealing all the time. I have seen great success from others in this area and have about a half dozen idea floating in my mind for doing this. I will most likely try both sides as an affiliate and a host of a program for a few different sites. One site i will be offering a program for is Essential Medical. This will work similar to the distributor section just online. For every refering site that sales either a download or drive Essential Medical will pay $5.

Also on the other end of things, I am looking to be an affiliate for a few differnt sites and will be setting up specific blogs and sites just for this purpose. I will document my findings as I progress.

I remember going to school and learning Visual Basic. It is a very easy language, but it was fun to make little cheesy programs, and I wrote a lot of them. Then I started to have dreams in programming laguages. It seems like I loved development in my sleep.

Last weekend my wife caught me talking in my sleep. She said I said “NO, Firefox!” I don’t know what I was dreaming of, but maybe it was from all the browser testing I did the last few days.

Anyone else have interesting, weird development or technology dreams?

Being a PHP guy you need PHP to run locally on your computer for testing. If your not running Linux and are used to IIS, if you have just upgraded to Vista and tried installing PHP from the PHP installer you found out it just didn’t work so well. After tinkering and searching I have found a few tips on how to get it going, and I will lay it out step by step for you.

1. Intall IIS7 under the programs menu. When choosing components for intalling make sure and choose the PHP ISAPI component.

2. Download the .zip package of PHP 5.2.1 from here.

3. Unzip the files into c:php. Or you can unzip them into whatever folder you like to create.

4. Copy the c:phpphp.ini-dist file to c:windowsphp.ini. Make sure and change the extention.

5. Click Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

6. Under IIS go to Handler Mappings.

7. Click under actions click Add Script Map…

8. You should get a window like the following:

IIS7

9. Fill in the fields: (Request Path: *.php) (Executable: c:phpphp5isapi.dll) (Name: PHP)

10. Hit OK.

Thats it! If you are used to just using the auto installer with Windows XP, this seems a little more extensive but after you get used to the IIS7 interface it will become second nature.

I would like to share some thoughts on MS Access as a development environment… About 2 years ago I worked for a company that developing applications in Access was how things were done. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Access has its advantages. Come on we all need something to keep track of our CD/DVD collections right?

I went to that company with experience in vb.net and C++, and a degree in Software Applications and Programming, so I was not a newbie in the desktop application development world. But never the less, my boss thought Access could do everything. On one occasion we had someone come in and give us some project requirements. It had to be a suite of 3 applications that interact with each other with one database behind them. Also it would be common that the database would have 10-20 million records. Now I have designed some databases in Access and when you reach around 1 million records things get a bit slow. During the meeting I brought up the idea of developing in .NET with a SQL Server Backend. I felt I was about to be fired when he screamed back in disgust. Well the client decided to go with us anyway (I have no idea why). And I was told to get going on developing it in Access. Well when I left I was just about complete building the first of three applications and it was a huge mess. The thing was slow and clunky, yet my boss could not figure out how to speed it up.

In the end I worked 12 and 14 hour days trying to make Access do something it was not designed to do. When I took the job I just wanted something to get development lifecycle experience, but in the end found that there are people in the development world that hang onto tradition way to long and need to try something new.