Welcome To Spoke Length Calculator

During spring 2018 I decided to take up an old subject, which I left behind way back in my early 20's. Programming. However, this time focus more on website development rather than c++. This came about due to a work project to rebuild the company website. Well, actually to come up with a design and get our website provider to create it.

This turned out to be a fun and at times frustrating project as our website provider couldn't work to a timeline that suited the company and started to cause a bit of frustration between us. It took at least four months from submitting the initial design to being turned into a website. Then another two months for the development to be completed. When the site was completed it looked a hundred times better than the original site.

I started to wonder if I could do a better job. After all it's just lines of code with some formatting!

During lunch breaks and some evening reading I started to pick up snippets of information on website development and within a short time I started to work on my first project, a spoke length calculator. The brief was simple, so I thought.

• Select Hub and Rim measurements from drop down menus
• Allow users to input their own measurements
• Display the spoke lengths
• Create a login system and allow users to save their wheel builds
• Let registered users add hub and rim data to the database

I knew there would be a database and some trickery would be required to update the drop-down lists of models when users selected different hub and rim manufactures. However, I didn't have a clue how to do any of it. With help from the internet I learnt the basics of MySQL, jQuery and PHP. I already had an excel file with hub and rim measurements and once the structure of the database was decided on I imported the hub and rim data.

Now the real fun begins

Watching YouTube I quickly became an 'expert'. (After all watching a 20 minute video automatically makes you one) on php and prepared statements, javascript and ajax. After renting a server and buying a ssl certificate the site went public on 15th May 2018. Since then the site has gone through a few behind the scene updates as my experience increases.

Below are the features i'll be working on over the coming months. As they are completed each one will be strike out

Coming Features

• Make the site mobile and small screen friendly
• Save your current wheel build configuration
• See list of saved wheel builds with dimensions and be able to re-use the dimensions
• To be able to add hub and rim measurements
• Update the database. It is about 13 years old
• Be able to calculate unusual spoke patterns
• Be able to validate other users data
• Make the database and make it searchable
• Also have the option to choose between different calculations
• Be able to recover your account
• Be able to delete your account and any personal data