[thelist] pretty databases vs. fast databases

Emma Jane Hogbin emmajane at xtrinsic.com
Sun Mar 9 19:56:01 CST 2003


On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 01:35:24PM +1300, Paul Bennett wrote:
> have looked at query caching but shied away in fear. (I fear change, I
> fear change!) Writing static files and keeping page info in the db is a
> great way to do this. *slaps forehead*

I've looked at caching as well and decided it was beyond me. Plus it would
involve installing more software. I can do XML + transformations with
stuff that's already installed though (PHP apparently is quite good with
XML files).

The database will also store "versions" of content so that you can track
changes. I'd thought about storing content in a CVS the way twiki does,
but decided to stick with MySQL because I couldn't get CVS to work
properly on my local system (and again that's more software that has to be
installed). Basically administration stuff will be directly into the
database, but the public site would all be "published" once something is
set to "public." It'll end up ADDING work for discussion boards that are
active, so I may need to rethink that part. But it's a theory that's a
work in progress. :)

Ultimately I'd love to have something like an opt-in version of Usenet.
This would be espcially for high-traffic archives like
http://www.fictionalley.org (who I believe gets something like 3Gb of
transfers a month). You can learn more about it here:
http://www.fictionalley.org/press.html
Basically it's thousands of 12 year old kids writing stories about Harry
Potter. (Although it's more than 12 year old kids...)

You would "subscribe" to an author or a book or (whatever). Then something
like an RSS feed would update your web site when a new story was
available. So I hear you saying, "why!?" Well because there are lots of
archives out there and they all want to have the "cool authors" be a part
of their archive....and the cool authors end up being a liability to a
person's archive because of the potential traffic (remember we're talking
about the budgets of 12 year old kids, not Yahoo.com).

Part Two (or maybe Part One) would be to allow authors to choose which
archives they would allow their work to be published on.

A lot of these ideas exist already, I'm just a little slow in coming to
them. Here are some of the ideas other people have thought:
http://www.aaronsw.com/projects#waonet
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/
http://open-content.net/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://opencola.com/

emma :)

--
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]



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