The time is speeding by. We're going to be heading out for our
European trip soon. I'm not sure how much of a vacation it will be
seeing as we're going to be visiting people. I hope it is.
I've been reading KenDown's weblog
about databases. It's helping to get some stuff into perspective for
Rior as I try to wrap my head around exactly what it is I'm trying to
do. Basically, I think I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible
to turn a row or set of rows in a database into an html page. Some of
the things flying around my head include auto-created table joins and
queries. Really heady stuff and I'm not sure I really understand
what it is I'm trying to do yet. I think part of is that I'm still
trying to understand how the use case works.
Anyway, KenDown's description of the data dictionary was exactly
something I was looking for and feeling my way toward until I read
about it. Apparently, it's a concept that's been around for a while,
but for whatever reason it didn't occur to me immediately. I sorta
had the idea, but now I've got what I want. His Andromeda project
seems interesting too. I'm trying to figure out if it'll mix well with
the work I've done so far. If so it'll save me quite a step.
The heat outside and the long days tell me it's summer time. We really should go on a vacation soon. My wife has been getting additional qualifications to teach music in the fall.
So, the upshot of switching to Ante on my weblog is that it's a lot easier to make changes to the page design. I've made some minor changes such as the picture in the upper left is just one jpeg now instead of 20 imgs for faster load times. What it didn't do was reduce the amount of code by very much if at all. It forced me to collect it all into one place and think about the sql queries I was using. If I recall, I had been making one query for each menu, plus one for the top menubar, plus one for the side bar, plus one for the comments. I'm down to three now, I think.
The code that I wrote to handle that properly has been moved into Rior over the past few weeks. Sometime in the next month or so, I'm hoping to switch the blog over to using Rior as well. That should reduce my code outside the libraries to almost nothing. It should also be relatively straightforward at that point to open up comments to allow my readers to comment on what I've said, like you see on most blogs. The reason I haven't done it up to this point was the difficulty in changing the page design and that I was using static files until the switch to Ante.
What I am wondering about, is how to stop spam bots from filling in my blog? I'm hoping not to have to spend much time verifying. There are various schemes that attempt to defeat the bots such as ReCaptcha which helps with digitising books, but I've heard that's been broken by paying pennies to people in developing nations for each one they break. I'm considering something along the lines of verifying that the comments are related to my articles and disallowing hyperlinks. I don't like disallowing hyperlinks as that cuts part of the conversation out, unfortunately. Hyperlinks is a large part of what makes the web work.
July!
by alan on Thu 3rd Jul 2008 7:14PM
The time is speeding by. We're going to be heading out for our European trip soon. I'm not sure how much of a vacation it will be seeing as we're going to be visiting people. I hope it is.
I've been reading KenDown's weblog about databases. It's helping to get some stuff into perspective for Rior as I try to wrap my head around exactly what it is I'm trying to do. Basically, I think I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible to turn a row or set of rows in a database into an html page. Some of the things flying around my head include auto-created table joins and queries. Really heady stuff and I'm not sure I really understand what it is I'm trying to do yet. I think part of is that I'm still trying to understand how the use case works.
Anyway, KenDown's description of the data dictionary was exactly something I was looking for and feeling my way toward until I read about it. Apparently, it's a concept that's been around for a while, but for whatever reason it didn't occur to me immediately. I sorta had the idea, but now I've got what I want. His Andromeda project seems interesting too. I'm trying to figure out if it'll mix well with the work I've done so far. If so it'll save me quite a step.
Summer vacation
by alan on Mon 21st Jul 2008 9:24PM
The heat outside and the long days tell me it's summer time. We really should go on a vacation soon. My wife has been getting additional qualifications to teach music in the fall.
So, the upshot of switching to Ante on my weblog is that it's a lot easier to make changes to the page design. I've made some minor changes such as the picture in the upper left is just one jpeg now instead of 20 imgs for faster load times. What it didn't do was reduce the amount of code by very much if at all. It forced me to collect it all into one place and think about the sql queries I was using. If I recall, I had been making one query for each menu, plus one for the top menubar, plus one for the side bar, plus one for the comments. I'm down to three now, I think.
The code that I wrote to handle that properly has been moved into Rior over the past few weeks. Sometime in the next month or so, I'm hoping to switch the blog over to using Rior as well. That should reduce my code outside the libraries to almost nothing. It should also be relatively straightforward at that point to open up comments to allow my readers to comment on what I've said, like you see on most blogs. The reason I haven't done it up to this point was the difficulty in changing the page design and that I was using static files until the switch to Ante.
What I am wondering about, is how to stop spam bots from filling in my blog? I'm hoping not to have to spend much time verifying. There are various schemes that attempt to defeat the bots such as ReCaptcha which helps with digitising books, but I've heard that's been broken by paying pennies to people in developing nations for each one they break. I'm considering something along the lines of verifying that the comments are related to my articles and disallowing hyperlinks. I don't like disallowing hyperlinks as that cuts part of the conversation out, unfortunately. Hyperlinks is a large part of what makes the web work.