Title: Bingo Card Creator
Date: March/April 2007
Sample Code:
Bingo Card,
Add a Tile,
Show all tiles,
Functions.
Quick Summary:
This project was created for my own entertainment value. It was designed to give me a
chance to flex my programming abilities and allow me to work a bit more with MySQL.
Project Background:
The bingo card creator was something I decided to do in my spare time. It took me about a
day to get everything working, spread out over the course of a few nights. I'm not entirely
sure why I decided to create the system, but something struck my fancy, and I decided that
I was going to make bingo cards.
The program works in such a way that it can be applyed to display anything on the bingo cards, be it an image, a phrase, or just a single letter/number. All the information that is displayed is stored in a simple table. The information is then pulled into an array in the display page, and an element is chosen at random (using the array_rand() function). After the element has been chosen, it is blanked out in the array, and another is chosen.
The tile is blanked to prevent the information from being chosen more than once. The system checks to verify that the element in question is not blank. If it is, another is chosen.
I created a second page so that anyone who wanted to could see all the elements that could possibly be put into the board (example). This is generally amusing on cards that have something other than the standard numbers on their bingo cards (for instance, images or phrases).
A third page was created to allow people to add their own custom elements to the boards (example). Again this is useful on cards that don't carry the standard numbers. It is especially useful if someone other than the webmaster is going to be maintaining the boards for any kind of future use.
The appearance the page was not embellished much beyond enough color to make things stand out because for my own use, I do not need it to look all shiney and sparkly. If someone were to want to use this professionally, the display would of course be revised to their likings.