07/17/02
I've been planning this for over a year. As my Weird story section has grown and grown I've pondered over how to increase its performance and design. My thoughts always came back to a database backend design, but I've never had any experience with databases and did not know how to accomplish this.
I've reached 434 pages now in this section and it was truly time to do something about it. For one thing, before the pages got too numerous for me to convert to another design. What I've come up with now is a database backend design for storage of all the information and a php front end using a template design so that I can change the look and feel of my site with very little effort.
I had to learn both PHP and MySQL to accomplish this. Again having no experience with them, but I found that both were not so hard to learn. PHP is very much like perl within html pages. Since I've programmed with perl for years, see my perl program section for some examples, this was quick to pickup. The database was not difficult as well, though I had to read some long manuals, but the MySQL website is well written and has an online searchable manual section.
Now that I can control the database this lead to ability of searching through all of the stories and jokes. Something I've tried to accomplish over the last 4+ years I've posted to this site. I've tried different perl programs to using the google site search abilities, but it was still not to my liking.
I have also added a rating system. This allows anyone to rate the joke, or story, from 1 (lame) up to a 5 (Excellent). The database will tally and give back the average rating for each joke/story. I felt this would be fun to give the public the ability to do this. It also lets others know what to expect from the joke/story before they read it.
You may also notice at the bottom of the page are random quotes, javascript generated, from Sun Tzu from his manual "Art of War". This is great reading as many people and high level business people put this into daily examples. I thought you would like it too.
Thank you for all those whom visit and enjoy this section. I get a steady 14,000 visitors a month reading 60,000+ pages. Not bad for posting this hobby on the Internet.