Our group study in web design at Haverford High School is going wonderfully. We are about 2 weeks in and are already done PHP basics. Tomorrow we will start on databases. We're going along much faster than I expected. We were also able to talk about design and CSS a bit. We also did some work with validation and standard XHTML.

Student Work

• Sean Maguire's Comment Form
• Shawn Ard's Tip Calculator
• Michael Gdovin's Tip Calculator
• Gary Hunt's Array Test

Friday was the first day of Haverford High School's group study in web design. It was an unexpected extra day, quarters normally change on Mondays. However, this extra day was good because we were able to finalize the participants.

• Michael Plasmeier (ThePlaz), leads the group, as the founder and lead developer for SeniorQuoter. He has several successful websites, and knows a lot about PHP/MySQL. His website is ThePlaz.com
• Michael Gdovin, is the founder of w3life a new media technology project. Michael is excited to learn PHP and MySQL. His website is Gdovin.net
• Shawn Ard, is a sophomore who excited to take part in this group study. He is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford.
• Sean Maguire, is also a sophomore who is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford. He runs Philles.tk, a website about the Philadelphia sports team.
• Gary Hunt rounds out the team. He is a senior at Haverford who also is a member of Team 484, the robotics team at Haverford. He is excited to start making some websites!

The day started out a bit rough, as there was some problems with the development sever. However, Plaz set aside the server to be fixed over the weekend, and instead lead a discussion on how the internet and PHP works. The discussion went very well due to the small number of participants, causing everyone to be engaged.

Mrs. Jane Greenspun also stopped by. Mrs. Greenspun is the director of technology for Haverford School District and is the mentor for our class. We appreciate her support.

We also would like to thank Mrs. Fish, the publications director for allowing us to use her room and for her continued support (and beta testing) of SeniorQuoter. We would also like to thank Mr. Jeffery Nesbitt, the principal of HHS, for his support in organizing the group study. Also thank you to Blu Talyor for his support along with Mr. Rob Anderson. Without the support of the administration, this group study would not be possible.

More details can be found here about the group study. Stay tuned to seniorquoter.org for planned weekly updates.

SeniorQuoter 1.4.2 fixes a small, but fairly important bug in how characters are counted after a quote is submitted.

Certain special characters (&, ", < and >) were incorrectly counted by the second pass, server side counter, in previous versions of SeniorQuoter, causing quotes which passed the length limits imposed by the "live" JavaScript counter, to be rejected after the quote was submitted. All yearbooks should upgrade to this version to insure that users are not incorrectly told that their quotes are too long. The only file which changed is: '/includes/functions.inc.php', so only that file needs to be overwritten.

Download v1.4.2 from SourceForge

These bugs were found by Haverford High School's Class of 2008. Thank you for putting up with and reporting the bugs!

SeniorQuoter 1.4.1 offers several bug fixes and new configuration options. As always, you can get SeniorQuoter from SourceForge.

• Added: Spell Check Server Configuration (If you don't want to use Google's servers - not supported)
• Fixed: The quote counter at the top of the page now does not re-count quotes which have been updated. It now accurately reflects the number of people who have submitted quotes.
• Fixed: After submitting a quote, PHP checks if the length of the quote exceeds the length limit set by the administrator. PHP used to count new lines as 2 characters, when the "live" JavaScript counter would count them as one. This would lead to a situation, where if a senior had a quote with many returns and neared the length limit, the "live" JS counter would say their quote was acceptable, but when it was submitted, PHP would report that it was too long. This is no longer the case.
• Changed: Some language has been changed to sound more professional, and one spelling error has been fixed.

Download 1.4.1 Now!

After taking a month off, SeniorQuoter 1.4 is out and ready for download from SourceForge!

The big feature in this release is spell checking! We also fixed what seemed to be a bug if one hit the "enter" key instead of clicking the "submit code" button after imputing their code. Also, we have some configuration-documentation improvements and other minor code re-arrangements.

Spell checking is done using GoogieSpell from Orangoo Labs. After entering text, one hits "check spelling". GoogieSpell then uses AJAX (requires JavaScript) to query a PHP script included in the GoogieSpell directory in SeniorQuoter 1.4, which then forwards the request to Google's spelling services. Although this is not an official Google service, numerous Google products use this system. If you would rather cut Google out of the picture, you can install the Nox Spell Server, a Python interface to Aspell. Alternatively, you could use GSpellerServer, a PHP 5 interface to pspell. Neither is supported by SeniorQuoter. Of course, you could use any server (or build your own) which uses Google's XML Spelling API. The reason we are using Google's service is because it does not require any additional software. Spell checking, of course, can be disabled by an administrator if they so wish.

We hope you enjoy spell checking. SeniorQuoter is on track to get an administration interface during the 06-07 school year.