The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
.:10:32:46 AM:.
Starting over...
Originally when I was first playing around with the concept of Booklink/Tracklink I did it in MS Access. Now before you all run away screaming your heads off saying "Heil Bill!" MS Access is great for trying a few SQL statements and it was easy to enter in some data-in other words prototyping. I didn't have Apache or MySQL installed because I didn't really see the need to run it on the P3 (aka 'The Tower'). Access is great for creating simple single user database stuff-not everyone has the know-how (or courage) to install their own server and modules but its really easy to pop in an Microsoft Office installation CD and check off what you want. I find there's still a perception that you need some technical prowess equivalent to near religious fanaticism if you want to go outside Microsoft. Anyways, what Access is not good for is when you start thinking beyond single-user, and I mean if you want to have discussion boards there's a high chance that there'll be more than one person on at the same time. They probably won't post at the _exact_ same time but they'll be clicking and reading-and that's enough.
So, in looking at my options there were a few routes I could pick, find somewhere that lets me use ASP but now SQL Server as well (for free-I'm still a poor-starving-engineering-graduate-:D), I didn't have an ASP server installed on the tower, I was using 1asphost.com to host/handle/test everything. I knew about php and mySql but for one reason or another (laziness) I just didn't install it. In addition I had to wonder where was I going to host it? On my own comp? I don't think Telus would appreciate that, plus I need my computer to do work-which, thankfully, is enough to handle what I want it to do. So in searching I came across 50free.com which seems to be quite enough to handle what I want.
This entire search spawned from problems implementing a login script in ASP. I couldn't get it to work properly with the Access database-or at least not the way I wanted it to work. So now, I'm relearning php, changing the way the scripts, I think I should be able to finish the initial version by the end of November.
So here are the goals of the initial version:
- User Login (To-Do)
- Users create links (This is the whole point of the site but I haven't figured out how to do it in an easy way-drop down lists eat up memory after ) (needs to be converted)
- Add books/authors to general database (needs to be converted)
- Books are divided into genres {e.g. Sci-Fi, Non-Fic, Political, etc.} (needs to be converted)
- Searchable by Title (needs to be converted)
- Searchable by Author (needs to be converted)
- Each user has a "I Own" list (To-Do)
- Each user has a recommendation list (no order, but three types {"Don't Read", "Read if you have Time", "Must Read!"} (To-Do)
Officially, I hope the roll-out version will have:
- Blogging Capabilities
- Friends list {capability to add/delete}
- Amazon Affiliate integration
- Maybe some kind of online Book-club discussion group thing?
Sounds like a lot for a side-project doesn't it? :P
Monday, November 17, 2003
.:2:42:06 AM:.
Some tweakin'
I wanted to create a central list of certain sites or blogs I read. This way I can just insert this one line in any of the templates or sites I'm on and it'll appear the same. So initially I thought maybe if I use frames or iframes but didn't like how much I had to change it so then I thought of how I could use Javascript... arrays came soon after. Unfortunately, Javascript doesn't really have a 'hash' like perl so I set up two arrays. One to hold the names of the links and another to hold the urls. I then used a simple for loop and iterated through it.
To call it all I have to do is insert these two lines...
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://webaddress.com/otherblogs.js">
</script>
Which leads to something like this:
Here's the reduced source code...
var linkname = new Array("link1",
"link2",
"Zeldman")
var linkadd = new Array("http://#link1#",
"http://#link2",
"http://www.zeldman.com/")
document.write ("<p>Blogs I read...</p>")
for (i=0; i<linkname.length; i++)
{
document.write('<a href="' + linkadd[i] + '">')
document.write(linkname[i])
document.write("</a><br />")
}
enjoy!
