Inter­relatedness

Last week — well, it was last week when I started this entry; more like ten days ago now — I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP on my computer. (I then spent half the afternoon trying to get PHP and MySQL to talk to each other before realising I had the wrong PHP extensions installed, but that's by the by.)

The eventual aim was twofold: firstly as a learning experience — my PHP and database experience was, at that time, approximately nil — and secondly to produce a database containing all the information about my books that was formerly captured in static HTML and updated manually. Scoff ye not; I've actually been vaguely thinking about this for well over a year. It's only now that I'm trying to avoid exam revision that I've actually been motivated enough to give it a go.

The end result is that my books page, now generated dynamically, looks exactly the same as it did before. Except that the "in queue" and "on wishlist" books are now displayed in alphabetical order. Whahey! The other benefit is that the five books selected from my queue and my wishlist, displayed in my Reading sidebar, are now selected randomly as opposed to my only ever updating them when I happen to read a book from that list. But now, (no-o-o-o-w *drumroll*), refreshing the page brings up a new random selection of five books from each. (Can I say "Whahey!" again?)

I realise that, to half my audience, this must seem incredibly trivial. But for me it's kind of fun, especially since I went from zip PHP/database experience to an up-and-running populated database and "application" in a week. Trying to figure out how to have a book written by more than one author in my normalised database was a bit of a struggle. Well, before I had the sense to Google the issue, that is :-)

And another upside to having done this? It paves the way for... The Project. Hang around another 18 months for me to be sufficiently motivated again, and you might even get to see a trace of it...