New Beginning (That Sure Is Redundant)

I've just started working on an application that is pretty exciting for me. It is built using PHP and interfaces with MySQL. I've only spent one evening on the project so far but it is coming along quite well. I have user registration working but need to read up on PHP's sessions - which is functionality I've never used before - to write the login code for the site.

I don't want to give anything away at the moment. I don't delude myself in thinking there are readers, but I still don't want this idea to get out because I think it has serious promise - even more than I felt Django had, which is saying a lot. I will say that it is an online application that could potentially be used in an intranet as well as the internet, that utilizes user membership, and that revolves heavily around community.

Once I get the project into a "beta" mode I will probably officially unveil it. Until then I will try to update the blog with relative, though obscure, status updates. I would give the tentative name for the application, but it gives too much away. I hope this has piqued at least one person's interest out there.

If you've read this far, I'll give a very small update on Django. Over the three weeks between Spring semester and Summer term I had time to put some work into it. I rewrote the searching approach to completely avoid using Google, instead using Yahoo! Music directly. There is also very limited spell check and recommendation support. Django also now will search Flickr to find artist images in the event that Yahoo! does not have one. The most important update is transparent to the end user - except in the increased rendering time.

In an attempt to speed the page rendering time an XML document containing information about the artist is stored on disc after an initial search, and is loaded directly on a second attempt instead of querying Yahoo! Music. This change typically provided a several second better rendering time compared to the first query.

The code is now mostly object oriented. The problem however, is that the current object model isn't all that great. After Thursday's eight in the morning Tennis class, I wrote what I think is a better approach at modeling the system with objects. I hope to rewrite Django in the coming weeks and find somewhere to host it. It doesn't do anybody much good running from my desktop or laptop on my LAN...