Bengfort.com

Yesterday I substitute taught a class for my adviser- TL 725; a graduate level class for computers in logistics (TL stands for the Transportation and Logistics major). My job was to teach a brief survey of HTML and web development to a class of pure beginners- their task was to build a website and later on to convert their sites to e-commerce style web sites. During the course of the class I realized two things: anyone can learn the basics of web development, and not only that everyone should learn the basics of Web Development!

Here is the deal: everyone in our family uses the Internet from everything to getting directions on Google maps to online grocery shopping, to instant communications, to sharing pictures. We even have a dedicated server all to our own family! The Internet is such an ingrained thing in our lives, yet we treat it as a mysterious thing that we can only know the surface of, even if we are perfectly content to have it as an necessary part of our lives.

I see a strong parallel to cars. Cars are so ingrained in American culture that 15 year olds own them- and really it is their first major purchase. From 15, we eat, drink, live, even sleep in our cars (and possibly other nocturnal activities!), and spend close to 5% of our day (1.2 hours) in them! (I spend close to 17% of my day in the car…). Yet only a select few Americans spend anytime building cars, or designing them. However, all Americans do know some very important things about cars:

1. The basics of internal combustion
2. How to change their oil
3. How to fill their tires, and check them
4. What technologies they want need to buy for better performance

We should treat our knowledge of the Internet the same way! We should know the basics of client server relationships (internal combustion), we should know how to change our il (write HTML), we should know how to check and fill our tires (formatting with CSS), and we should know what technologies we want when we need better performance (JavaScript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc). This basic overview will give us a better Internet experience, just like the car knowledge gives us a better driving experience.

To that end, and for the class, I wrote an introductory survey to Web Development, its only 10 pages long, but I wrote it with you guys (my family) in mind! I would highly encourage you to read it and respond with comments to me! Also, check the links in the appendix of the document for further tutorials.

The survey can be found here:
[Link to be updated soon]

Yesterday I mentioned that the Internet was the Wild Wild West, well folks, our own covered wagon that is Bengfort.com recently got mobbed by a pack of angry bison. That’s right- if bison get angry, they attack! Ok, maybe they don’t, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a pack of angry bison- or one angry bison for that matter (NDSU students are mostly just cold). But I can imagine that if you left food outside your covered wagon, the bison would show up and take advantage of you.

Now that I have you properly thinking: “what?” I guess I should let you know what happened. Bengfort.com is our covered wagon- the bison are spam comments delivered to us via robot, and we my friends just got spammed on the way to Oregon. You have probably heard of spam emails, but what in the heck are spam comments? Well, they are basically the same thing, but instead of being sent to you via email- they are posted on the comments section of the blog- so if you were wondering about all those comments about Viagra, don’t worry: its not your post!

You may or may not know that I have been working hard on ripping out the internals of the site to add better and new code- things that you can’t see in real time since it takes a lot of development work on my part to get anything ready to go. Well, on Monday while I was working on it, I happened to query the comments portion of our database- only to find that we had 4268 comments on the blog! While this is my dream to someday have that kind of participation, it struck me as odd considering no one has really been blogging as of late, so I checked it out, and it was comment spam!

Everything from “love your post, want to buy a car…?” to “free viagra, get longer faster” was on the comments section, and really the only thing I could do was delete the entire table from the database and start from scratch- so I did so, vowing to make the problem go away. The next day I checked again (without fixing the problem) and there were 278 comments on the blog! Well- the Bison had our number, so I had to drop the functionality completely (for now).

So in the future, you are probably going to have to sign in to add a comment to the page, which means that the site is going to have a lot more members, or else a lot of permissions work that I’m going to have to do, but out here in the wild wild west, sometimes you have to pay a guy just for the water rights (watch more westerns if you don’t get that!)

For now, please comments via twitter or email!