[thesite] Tips Database

Seth Bienek seth at sethbienek.com
Sun Jul 22 20:20:31 CDT 2001


> The biggest
> problem is that since the tips do not have a rigid structure, tip
> author's have tended to abuse the format and each chunk needs to be
> manually inspected especially if higher-level processing is to be done
> on them.

What I was planning on doing is pulling everything between the tip tags.  Tip attributes must be quoted, and I was returning a list of whatever attributes were asked for.  In other words, if the custom tag was called with <cf_tipparser attributes="author,type"...> then the attributes 'author' and 'type' would be pulled and returned with the tip structure, otherwise blank values for those attributes would be returned.

What the plan was for keeping those in a database, however, I am unaware.  IMO, the standard attribtes are 'type' and 'author'.  My plan was to have db fields for these two attributes; if an author was specified then the that author would be used, otherwise the field would be left empty and on displat the email address of the poster of that messageid would be cross-referenced with the members table and that userid would be used, unless there were no match in which case the name (if available) from the original email would be used.  This would allow us to link tips with author profiles (and their articles, etc.) when available.

I was thinking that the type would be saved as well, and a seperate lookup table established (later) to allow mapping of pseudo-types to standardized categories (i.e. Cold Fusion and ColdFusion and CF would all have lookups mapping to ColdFusion with a standard id).  This would require a little admin interaction (not much), but I'd be willing to volunteer my time.  It would be a kickass feature as it would allow lookups by subject ('Show me all the 'ColdFusion' tips submitted').

> Do you want every message from the mbox inserted into THELIST table?

Yes.  This is important because it not only allows searching and database-driven display of the messages, but it also allows us to sort/group/display them by author, thread, date, and relate them to the database records for user profiles and tips.

> Currently, I am only inserting the messages with the tips in them.

This doesn't really help because the idea is to get (and keep) all of the messages in the database.  See above.

> I'm also doing processing of the tips.  (This is modified Tip
> Harvester code.)  Is there a point in doing this?

I hope I answered this question above too.  :)

Concerns/Comments?

Seth
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness.  Think of your three best friends.  If they're okay, then it's you."  -Rita Mae Brown
-----------------------------------
Seth Bienek
Digitaris Technologies, Inc.
tel (972) 690-4131, ext. 103
fax (972) 690-0617
icq 7673959
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