Scott Buffington's Projects
Buff Site Engine: I started this project when I first wanted to learn PHP, which was shortly after starting my first website. What started as a template based website engine turned into a full blown Content Management System. I am often tweaking features and considering the future of Buff and where I see it going in the future. Some of the features include categories, commenting, RSS and Atom feeds, Pingomatic support, archiving and search. I am unsure if I will ever release Buff to the public, but variations of the code have been used on friends websites. Buff saw major changes in 2008, making it easy for me to quickly roll it out on a new domain.
BuffSched: This is a command line scheduling application written in shell script and is currently compatiable with all UNIX and UNIX-like operating sytems. A simple text file holds all your scheduled appointments and ignores any entries that are not in BuffSched formt. This is so you can keep a todo list and any other information you deem useful in the text file. I carry mine on my thumb drive so I can access and change my schedule at work and at home.
The BuffSched script currently supports four types of recurring events, those being weekly events (Every Monday for example), biweekly events (Every two weeks from specific date for one year duration), annual events (Every December 6), and single occurrence events (15 November, 2006). As entries are added to the schedule file, their specified dates are standardized. BuffSched notifies you of scheduled events for the next 7 days, this duration can easily be changed by altering one variable at the top of the script. I mostly use BuffSched on my servers now as a replacement for the Message of the Day. Calling it via users profiles I can update them on scheduled downtime as well as corporate holidays.
BuffEdit: This is a simple text editor for Mac OS X. BuffEdit is an example of my adventures with Cocoa programming. I may or may not improve BuffEdit, there are many features I would like to add in the future but only if I find the motivation and time.
I am a hobbyist programmer and this was the first program I ever offered for public consumption. I absolutely prefer Vim as a text editor, so BuffEdit may likely never resurface. I wrote the NaNoWriMo novel, "Danger is Awesome", that I had printed with BuffEdit, that was the last time I used the program.
Scrambled Word of the Day: One of the first little applications I wrote in PHP was a "message of the day" script, which I set up to function like UNIX fortune which I was always amused with since first using UNIX systems. An old friend of mine mentioned wanting a "word of the day" feature on a website, I thought that was not quite exciting enough. So I wrote a function that scrambles words and at the behest of Alex Harden threw it together into a script that not only tells you when you guess the scrambled word, but also kept statistics of how accurate you are with your guessing. I also added a feature that only enables you to play once a day and get statistical credit, as the word stays the same until the following day. The previous word of the day is revealed each day and revealed and definitions of the words are all available for easy retrieval.
Taglr: Taglr was a social bookmarking in the same vein as Delicious, but using SemanticScuttle. I currently have Taglr disabled while we decide whether we are going to continue the project or not. Taglr is a joint project I am working on with a friend and SemanticScuttle is an OpenSource project I hope to get involved with. I have made minor improvements to the SemanticScuttle code running on Taglr, most notably the addition of reCAPTCHA to combat register spam.
Taglr has a more robust tagging system than Delicious does as well as social voting for submitted bookmarks. There is also the ability to post private bookmarks on Taglr. The API included with SemanticScuttle is based off the version 1 Delicious API. This is another area where I made some modifications, utilizing the API, there were no options for not including the private bookmarks. I added options to the API to not include bookmarks marked private if the user so chooses.
Brutal Deluxe Football League: The Brutal Deluxe Football League is an absolute fun and cool way for me to merge a few of my
favorite pasttimes into one project. I use an incarnation of the Buff Site Engine and FFLM AOL Fantasy Football to create a fantasy football league that has a personality. The league is named after one of my favorite video games and provides all the owners with the ability to post fictional news stories on anything they choose. Creative writing fictional funny stories was always kind of a fun thing for me to do, the football league enables me a platform to do this. Fortunately we have a group of guys who join in and post some funny stories of their own. This adds to the fun of fantasy football in my opinion and sets the league apart from many of the others I have taken part in.
Central Pennsylvania UNIX Users Group: CPUUG is about exploring the many fun and clever ways to use any and all UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. The idea for Central Pennsylvania UNIX Users Group started after I began looking for user groups in the Harrisburg area. I was specifically looking for a UNIX users group, one that dealt with all flavors of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, both to learn and to do some professional networking. To my surprise, there was only Harrisburg UNIX Users Group, and the site had not been updated since 2000. No events, no mailing list and no forum, the group apparently is no more.
