Entries this day: AM Haha_train Ideas

AM

8:37am JST Tuesday 20 July 2004

Okay: make a list of things to do and do it.

Haha train

4:04pm JST Tuesday 20 July 2004

Waiting for the train to come, standing near the shaded side of the platform, away from the impending train arrival side of the platform, twirling my Gilligan hat, I dropped it onto the track below.

Oops.

I knew it would take a long time to tell someone I had dropped it, have them go through the necessary procedure of getting a retrieval device, etc etc etc and retrieving my hat. The procedure would certainly make me miss the next train. So, before anyone could say anything or even notice, I jumped down to the track, grabbed my hat, and jumped back up onto the platform. Made it back up seconds before the train arrived.

The two (2) train conductor guys (who were right behind me) facing the approaching-train side of the platform didn't even see me. Haha

It was fun to break the rules and get away with it.

(( concerned-yet-not-carefully-reading readers please note: the train was coming on the other side of the platform from me ))

Ideas

1:56pm JST Tuesday 20 July 2004

        From:     rob@robnugen.com
        Subject:  new db ideas
        Date:     12:15pm JST Tuesday 20 July 2004
        To:       maggie

Maggie!!

How are you?

I've just written a long email to you, and I didn't lose it, BUT half
of me wants to scrap it.  (It's included below)

I want to redo my site.  I thought mysql holding all my journal
entries and stories would be a great idea.  But now I'm wondering if I
should just put everything in careful directory structures and write
more perl index-code to navigate everything.

I basically want users to be able to search by date or by content type
(journal, skate stories, rally reviews, state of my life updates,
coaster pics, etc).  I want to have RSS feeds to advertise what is the
latest cool thing at my site.  I want images to be included in this
searchable thingamajig.

sigh.

If you have time and ideas, I'd love to know them.  I've worn out my
brain on this email (and searching the web); I need to take a break
for now.

	With Love
	- Rob!

original email:

Maggie!

How are you, my dear friend?

It's been too long since I've really worked with you, so I'll jump into it:

I wanna put the content of my site in a db, and I'm considering
different structures.  I'd like to use mysql, since that's what's
available at no extra cost on my server.  Right now I don't really
care about encryption (and I know "adding encryption later" would
likely be a nightmare, unless I layer the application carefully), but
I do care about the following:

1) allowing users to read by date (preferably in a format similar to
   what I have online now)
2) allowing users to read by genre  (*)
3) allowing the concept of multi page "articles" or multi-day stories
   to be linked (**)
4) number 2 makes me realize I might as well have different language
   versions of my site available - just put all the content in a db
   and serve it up like hotcakes

(*) "next wild skating adventure" or "next rally review" or "next
Japanese entry" or "next super secret private entry about Maggie and
her wild nights"

(**) Like on many e-magazines they have page 1, page 2 etc for
articles.  I'd like to similarly link the chapters of _The PIN_ or
other long stories.


-------------- moving files from my computer to my server  -------------

I'd like to have automated ways to smurf my writings into the db.
Right now I write them on my laptop, and then scp (secure copy) them
to my server to the appropriate directory.

Right now I do the following two steps to get journal entries online

1) scp LOCALFILES www.robnugen.com:journal where LOCALFILES are the
   names of the files on my machine.  On my server ~/journal is
   symlinked to ~/public/journal/2004/07 (today's year and month in my
   journal directory)

2) run robnugen.com/cgi/updatedb.pl which recreates the index of my
   journal


So, in the more generalized version, I'm thinking I could do something
like the following to get entries online:

1) scp LOCALFILES www.robnugen.com:FILETYPE

where LOCALFILES are the names of the files, and FILETYPE corresponds
to directories on my server.

2) Initiate a process on my server (via the web) to grab the files
from the various FILETYPE directories and put them in the DB in the
right places.

------------ ideas I hope to get from Maggie -----------

I'm looking to you for database table design.

table of genres
table of