WebReference.com finishes off their series looking at user personalization with this new tutorial focusing on the administrative section of their example site.

Administration of an application is necessary because any website or application that involves users becomes bloated and very slow. This can be because many users have stopped using the application without removing some of the information that they were using. As a result, a lot of redundant data is left in the system that causes it to become slow. For this reason, we need to have a section in the application that will do the 'clean up' of redundant data or 'house keeping'.

The administration script allows an admin to look at the bookmarks in each user's account and remove any that are older, duplicate or might not be needed anymore. The admin section also allows a current admin to promote a current user up to the admin level too.

WebReference.com has posted the next tutorial in their "user personalizaton" series - a look at the user's "home page" once they've logged in.

In this article, we will be looking at the home page of the application. This is the first page that the user will see after they have gone through the authentication process. The page will provide links and access to the rest of the application, except the admin section.

The code connects to the database, fetches all of the information about the user and their bookmarks. A table is generated showing the URL listing and the navigation is built. Also included it a bit of code to create a "recommendations" system.

WebReference.com has kicked off a new series of tutorials today with this first part of their look at building a personalization system as a part of a bookmarking system.

In this tutorial we will build an online bookmark system. This will be used to create a database for storing all our URL's and their descriptions. There are many commercial and non-commercial applications that offer almost the exact functionality that we will create in our application; the difference is that we have full control over our application, allowing us to tweak it to suit our needs.

The application lets users login/logout, manage bookmarks, gives recommendations based on those bookmarks, show some news headlines and, most importantly, the user must be able to personalize their interface with a custom color scheme and image of their choosing.

This first part gets up to the point of creating the databases (a bookmarks and users tables) and creating the basic template wrapper for the entire site.