New Functionality

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I’ve added a new section to this blog – reviews.

As do other bloggers, I’ve been putting in reviews of books and movies that I’ve read/viewed as boxed items as part of a blog entry. The review section gathers all these reviews together in one location, one page each for each category (books, movies, whatever…).

This section differs from my next most-recent addition, the Top 10 section: Top 10 is just a listing of items in various categories – little detail and encompassing books/movies/memorable first/last lines I’ve been exposed to over the course of my life.

The review section, on the other hand, is a short capsule review of a book/movie that I’ve just finished or am in the course of experiencing. In other words, you won’t see a review of The Brothers Karamazov (one of my all-time favorites) unless I re-read the book. You may see a reference to it a Top 10 list, however.

Any questions?

The Reviews section is build very much like the Top 10 section: Basically, entry forms/database hosted on a local machine and then pushed as static HTML to this host (which doesn’t have database support).

Specifically, the Review pages are generated in the following manner:

  • Local PHP-coded pages allow the addition of a new review or edit of existing entry. Information stored in a mySQL database (two tables, items and item types)

  • A picture can be associated with a given review. Dupes are blocked; successful uploads are resized with ImageMagick and immediately copied to local and remote hosts. No blobs; the photo is stored in the file system and a pointer (file name/extension) stored in database.

  • For edits, there is the option to toggle the suppression/display of a given review (all deletes are soft-deletes, not true “delete from table where…”)

  • Whenever desired, a generation page will create a Review Index page and detail page for each review category in static HTML and push same to local and remote hosts (again, all PHP against mySQL database). Logic is present to only generate category pages for categories with active items; each category page shows only active reviews.

  • Once I’m comfortable with code and have stopped tweaking, I’ll set a CRON entry for the regeneration page and have it run nightly, so the site is always fresh. Remember – there is the deactivate option, so reviews that are drafts can be worked on without inclusion on this site.

Worth doing; hopefully, someone will find these reviews worth reading.