Techport80 Home

Techport80 first started over 3 years ago. Since then I have had wavering interests in the project. As my skills as a PHP/MySql programmer improved I became less enthusiastic about the now obvious changes that needed to happen this site. Eventually, I reached the point where I could not stand Techport80 the way it was any more. Over a recent 3 day weekend, I decided to write a brand new "Portal" for techport80. I was able to finish every thing but the security module during that weekend. Later I added the security model. (It took about 15 minutes.)

One of the goals of Techport80 is for every application seen, featured, or used on this site is coded by me, Ronald Weidner. This has been true since day one (except for a brief experiment with Mambo -- purely for the experience). My intention is to update the home page weekly, and to add a tutorial, news article, or joke daily. It's my intention to write many of the tutorials seen on this site. It might be worth noting that some of the tutorials I'll write will be about software I wrote. Therefore, Techport80 may be the only place to find tutorials and documentation. Which now brings us to an introduction on Techport80 !NET.

Techport80 !NET is a web programming API written to speed development of web applications. The API is written in OOP style using PHP. It's still quite new but already it has proven to be a successful tool. The "Portal" you are using now was written with this API. Work is currently underway to port the API into other programming languages starting with pascal. (Because if I don't do it no one will). A more natural port of the API would be to python and Perl.If you are interested in learning how you can help porting, please contact me. I will probably be committing my changes to the API here twice per month. So be sure to keep and eye out for changes.

As I mentioned before, this portal was written over a weekend by only one programmer. As such, it needs much work before I can consider it a full "Portal". The day after I finished writing this version, I came up with a better way to implement some of the core organizational features. So, work has started on making these changes. Additionally, this site isn't search engine friendly. I need to fix that problem asap. Once those two items are fixed, work will begin on mods(polls, bookmarks, search, etc), user personalizations, and user communication tools.

As always, I hope you have as much fun reading whats here as I did putting it here.

Ron_W