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May 18, 2005

Coding Day

Today's going to be a productive day. I'm working on a redevelopment of my wife's website. My wife makes some beautiful jewelry, which you should go and buy (hint hint). My mother designed her website, and did a great job of it, back when she was getting her certificate in Internet Technology from our local community college.

The site looks great, and works well for the purposes, but has some limitations. Mainly, it isn't database driven. Each page, and each item for sale on the page, is manually created. This means that any changes to any item for sale, such as marking it sold, requires a manual edit of the page. This is less than ideal.

I've been jawing about how I needed to redesign the website so it can be run from a database for a long time. This isn't such an easy job, because I've never actually written any database driven websites before. I've maintained code written by others, installed sites, maintained the databases themselves, and tweaked things to work better for my purposes, but I've never started from scratch to do it myself. Today, this changes.

This morning, I've made the first few steps. I've created the database. I've built my first table. I've put in several entries, and I've got my php script pulling entries from the table. I've got the beginnings of a catalog listing going, with checks to see if the item is sold or on display in the local art gallery (with different text in the place of the price for each of those). Because of the mild quirkiness of my webhost, I had to jump through a hoop or two before I got this far. As it turned out, the mild quirkiness was solved completely by the fact that they provided much of the code I needed to solve my problems right there in the interface. I had been concentrating so hard on my reference materials, I overlooked the answers that were right under my nose already.

Once I'm done, my wife's job will be much easier when it comes to website management. Instead of editing many pages and re-uploading, she will only need to click a checkbox or edit a field for the items she needs to update. This will mean more regular updates, better functionality, more available features, and hopefully more sales.

Personally, this means a much wider skillset for myself. I plan to put these skills to use in the future, in many ways.

Posted by Lockjaw at May 18, 2005 8:51 AM

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