I don’t have many readers, I’m scared to even download the stats and have a close up read of what web traffic that I do manage to attract, although I can imagine that a sizable majority of this will be of a non-human form, web bots. All the same, sometimes it is nice to have an idea and implement it. That was the notion that I hit upon a few years back when I had my old Worlds related web site. I wanted a menu of links that was populated (filled in to us non-techie types) via PHP and MySQL, and I did it, and it worked, and it inspired me to add a view more database-linked things. (And the grammar of that sentance was appalling, I do apologise). Since then my hobbies have changed from chatting to anonymous entities across the world; to walking up things (and stumbling back down them!), but my intention to make a web site out of my interests hasn’t changed one iota.

Some years later after initiating the walking web sites I have obviously used the same database-links to populate the menus but have now (finally) actually begun to access more things from the database. Whereas at one time all of the walks were on a separate page (for example catbells.php) the information that would have been on these separate pages is now stored on the database itself in a “HTML_DESC” field. The upside of this is that the pages now do seem to load marginally quicker. The downside is that now the entire process from editing to publishing is now highly invold in that I have to now:

• Create and edit the page in any software that creates html output.
• When this page is finished get whatever html generating software to look for all instances of ” and replace thse with blanks.
• Login to my web control panel and then into PhpMyadmin.
• Add the appropriate record to the database that covers the areas. (I had to do this before.)
• Add the hill name and other details to its database record…and now copy all of the edited page into the HTML_DESC field

What a kerfuffle, but it loads one-tenth of a second quicker than it did previously when everything was hard-coded!

I’m still not utilising the database setup efficiently, there is more that I could do, but for now, as a great man once said, “I have other worlds to visit”!