The "latest" view now truncates long entries at half a kilobyte (after stripping tags). Disentangled the blog engine's INCLUDE heirarchy from the overall site design, relocated the "controller" into the app directory, and replaced hard-coded path and file references with centrally-configured variables. The goal is to be able to rename the app's directory, move it up or down a level, even put a container+configuration module pair somewhere else in the site file structure, and have it serve seamlessly wit... (...more)

So if we're going to do this join table connecting entries to tags, there are 5 places we need to add code to interact with the entry-tag table: Once in each of the 4 phases of the entry "life cycle" (Create, Read, Update, Delete), and once more in a catch-all category we'll call "maintenance". Depending how rigorously we design the database back-end, maintenance as such may be superfluous, but in this application there's one situation where we may reasonably want an additional "tag maintenance" functi... (...more)

3.3mi in ~51 minutes, peaking at 5.1mph on the 3rd or 4th half-lap burst, and some longer, slower jogs up to 3/4 lap. Almost, but not quite, hitting the 4mph average. When I got there ~4:30 the entire row of treadmills was monopolized by a bunch of kids aged maybe 9-14, all speaking something like Czech or Hungarian, herded by some young guy who just completely fuckingly ignored me when I made eye contact and asked if they would be done soon. Twice. Fortunately they were done soon. Hope this isn't a dai... (...more)

Something I didn't think about until I started adding in a "list all entries tagged with X" view... in the absence of a join table mediating between entries and tags, the SQL to retrieve a subset of entries with a specific tag is: SELECT * FROM entries WHERE tags LIKE '%my tag%' Having to resort to a 'LIKE' comparison usually means really sloppy, and often unsafe, design. In this instance, it means that clicking through a link connected to the tag "cat" will also catch all entries tagged "catheter", "b... (...more)

The trivial part of the tag-support revision was, well, trivial: Add a "tags" column in the entries table. Add an input field and fix the SQL accordingly in the Create / Update phases of the post form. Pretty up the entry-view template and that was that. The not-so-trivial part is to manage the tags table "on the fly". Say we're creating a new entry, and the tags table is empty. We explode() and trim() the tags field, and find 3 tags: "fitness", "mileage" and "web design". We SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tags W... (...more)