portal tips
M is working on making a portal, and Zuly and Carla were looking for some tips on making one too, so I thought I’d put some tips together 
I created my portal to keep track of all of the bookmarks and things that I need on a daily basis. Its the homepage in my browser, several items that are personal, I have set up with php to only show them to a specific IP address.
I took a copy of my info and commented it up with MT snippits and made up a few stylesheets. I use MT to generate all of the content, but this doesn’t necessarily need to be inside of MT to work. I have it in my lovelinks blog linked to a template and set to not rebuild just so its easy to update.
I’m happy to write up a few more things if people have questions. I’ll probably write this up as a tutorial with pics of the stylesheets on blogstyles, but for now, you can snatch the source at portal.php.txt. The following styles will work with this, just download the one you want and change the link in the php page to reflect the name of the one you want.
blue bumble bee bright pink red light mint light blush
Feel free to modify these, but if you’d like, keep the blogstyles link on it (you can change it to "inspired by blogstyles" or something like that.)
Comments
Thank you! Now I’ve got a fun weekend project.
Posted by: Brandy | April 4, 2003 04:02 PM
I was working on putting my portal page together after M suggested it; stumbled upon your post by accident, after accidently closing your portal page, which I was peeking at for inspiration. Thank you for putting this up here!
Posted by: Jennifer | April 4, 2003 04:08 PM
Another thing-- the little weather bit you’ve got on your portal page—where is that from? Even peeked at your source, and couldn’t find anything useful...
Also, because I’m trying to make this page as useful as possible for myself, let me ask this:
You mentioned over at M’s that there are certain things on the page only viewable from your IP (I assume you did that with htaccess?). What sorts of things have you included? I’m just looking for inspiration.
Posted by: Jennifer | April 4, 2003 04:16 PM
Oooh! Very cool. Thank you chica.
I was curious about the IP thing too.
Posted by: GeekGrrl | April 4, 2003 04:20 PM
Oh, good questions, Jennifer!
The weather is from the MTWeather plugin, and then I created my own images to match the different weather options. The actual code I use is on the plugin page.
And for the hidden stuff - I’m actually using PHP to check to see if my IP address matches the visitor—since I have an IP address that doesn’t change, that works well.
<?
$ip = $REMOTE_ADDR;
if ($ip == "xx.xxx.xxx.xxx") {
echo
?>
links here
<? } ?>
I have links to logins for other sites I help on, like a direct link to scriptygoddess MT login, and some stuff for helping :blogomania: that don’t necessarily need to be seen by everyone. Everything has passwords still to get into it, it just is stuff that people wouldn’t care to see if they happened on my portal!
Posted by: kristine | April 4, 2003 04:24 PM
Thanks!
Is an IP check using PHP more or less secure than htaccess, do you think?
You absolutely rock. I don’t know if people tell you that often enough. You’re such a good resource for, well, everything.
Posted by: Jennifer | April 4, 2003 04:30 PM
Oh, and you may need to use $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"] instead of $REMOTE_ADDR depending on how your server is set up.
Posted by: kristine | April 4, 2003 04:30 PM
I’d guess that htaccess is more secure, but since the php is parsed on the server as the page comes up, there shouldn’t be any reason why it isn’t secure. I don’t know that I’d put passwords or things like that in there, just because I’m not 100% sure what hackers could get at that I don’t know about. LOL!
Thanks for the compliments, I’m always so glad to hear that my stuff helps people
Oh, and if anybody wants something for the LATEST ENTRY section like mine, the tutorial for that is over at scriptygoddess - MT hacks: Multiple blog Updates List
Posted by: kristine | April 4, 2003 04:35 PM
So talented... Isn’t she so talented?
Posted by: Jenni | April 4, 2003 04:42 PM
You are soooooooo cool. Thanks for all the great information. I can’t wait to start putting this stuff together!!
Posted by: Zuly | April 4, 2003 07:22 PM
Groovy, you’re so damn talented, chickie!
I’ll have to play...now can you just please find me about 24 extra hours over the weekend with no kids?? 
:
Posted by: Crystal | April 4, 2003 08:20 PM
oh dear, and i haven’t even gotten the newzcrawler operational at this point. i am really behind the 8-ball now!
Posted by: jane | April 5, 2003 08:48 AM
YAY! Thank you. You rock!!
Posted by: GeekGrrl | April 5, 2003 09:26 AM
Oh wow, this is awesome! This is such a huge coincidence because I am modifying one of my portals this morning!
Posted by: Nancy | April 5, 2003 12:24 PM
Posted by: Carla | April 5, 2003 10:24 PM
You absolutely rock - thank you so so much for doing all the "heavy lifting" on this! I’m looking forward to putting some of my favorite RSS feeds in there!
Posted by: Donna | April 14, 2003 11:47 AM