http://hiremasonwolf.com An online resume and portfolio of work by Mason Wolf Tue, 06 May 2008 23:46:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here's a neat question - how much is a lottery ticket worth before the numbers are drawn? The problem is a fun one for someone with a love of statistics, or someone who just wants to prove a point about why they never buy a lottery ticket. To answer it, I ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/calculating-the-value-of-a-single-lottery-ticket/58 Harrisonburg Blogs represents my first attempt at running a Wordpress MU site. The intention is to create a portal where anyone living in or around my home city of Harrisonburg can enter into the blogging scene and easily connect with other bloggers who are already active. To that end, it ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/harrisonburg-blogs/57 Well, as of today I am officially certified by Zend as an expert in PHP 5. Around the beginning of the month I purchased the Zend examination bundle. It included both the physical and electronic versions of the study guide by php|architect, 10 practice exams, and the official certification exam, ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/zend-certified/55 I loved this latest project. It all started when I helped a fellow named Jay on experts-exchange with an issue that had been challenging him for quite some time. After he had his solution, he actually contacted me through a post on this blog asking me to give him a ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/military-signatures/48 I'm now a "Zone Advisor" at experts-exchange.com. Altogether, there are 55 of us, each responsible for 1 or more topic areas. In my case, I'm responsible for two: PHP and blogging. The blogging is because of my experience with Wordpress, though it also includes Movable Type, which I have some ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/masonwolf-zone-advisor/44 Recently, I developed a Wordpress plugin for the company I work for, Inside Success Productions. It gave Wordpress users the ability to easily add a feed from our website to their blogs, and for our affiliates this meant the chance to earn a small passive income for every new subscriber ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/a-more-general-approach-to-the-isr-interview-widget/43 One of the things which I feel has held back some of my web applications from their true potential has been my lack of javascript knowledge, and AJAX methods especially. I finally decided to do something about this, so I bought a book "AJAX and PHP" from Amazon last week. ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/my-first-ajax-project/39 Converting a Wordpress plugin to a widget doesn't have to be difficult, but because the official API's over at wordpress.org are so lacking in detail (the example they provide won't even work if you cut and paste), many developers can become frustrated with the process. STEP 1: Using a widget to ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/plugin-to-widget/36 In my current full-time job as webmaster for Inside Success Radio, I don't often get a lot of opportunity to do really cool new programming. However, I had a blast with my latest project, and I was proud enough of it that I'm going to share it here. Basically, we run ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/the-isr-interview-widget-for-affiliates/34 Though I originally developed this wordpress plugin just for my personal use, I decided to generalize it so anyone can display their rank on experts-exchange.com. Now I'm hoping others find it useful as well. The point tally automatically updates when you gain new expert points, so it's never out of date. ... http://hiremasonwolf.com/the-experts-exchange-badge/31