Last weekend I finally got inspired to sit down at vidbb’s code. (for some reason, I miss being involved with the non-profit world)

Anyway, for the first time in over 8 months I took a look at vidbb’s guts… It took me a little while to figure out why I had done some of it the way that I had… but I did. I got some more of the individual-video page’s form pulling the appropriate data from the db. Also attacked making that form AJAXified and was a little successful. On change, the select boxes contact the DB and 1) insert a new row into the edits table and 2) try to update the appropriate record of the person’s description table.

The first step worked except that the timestamp column isn’t updating. The problems there were 1) I was using MySQL query browser to edit the table and it wouldn’t allow the time_edited column to be not null… I guess I’ll have to brush the cobwebs off my SQL programming and edit the table properties with sql.

Problem 2) was that the query for the table update kept choking on the query. When I first developed vidbb, I was experimenting with various DB layers and settled on PHP ADODB. I don’t think I had ever run into any problems until this weekend for some reason it was adding an ‘LIMIT’ clause onto the insert (update?) query… at least I think that’s what it was choking on.

I also spent a lot of time taking the form out of the formatted string and made it just a regular mixed page (markup with php in it). I had been trying to keep the back-end logic and front-end markup completely separate but it turned out to be more of a hassle than I could justify.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with what I did. It has been a while since I’ve worked on this… I just need to re-familiarize myself with it. There does seem to be a lot of kruft that I need to prune…

I’ve been thinking a lot about redoing my music site, mus.so.des, again.  Right now, the only thing it’s good for is searching my music collection but I would really love to make it more community driven/music-head friendly.  This being the case, I’m retooling the database a little.

When I first started keeping track of my music collection, I just used an Excel spreadsheet, and that worked fine.   After I finished grad school, though, when I had a little time for projects of my own, I converted it to a mysql database and put it online. It works fine as just a searchable list but now I think it’s time to make it more useful to other people…

Like everything with my personal web projects, I’m doing it all on the fly so we’ll see how it goes…