Column Comments in MySQL

By Colleen, on January 12th, 2009%

A while back I was lamenting that table comments in MySQL  get overlooked, and did a post on it, both how to create them, how to update them, and how to view them.  The fact that my table comment post remains quite popular indicates that mySQL hasn’t SEO’d their pages on it thoroughly enough, and people are obviously looking for information on it. So… I thought I should follow with a column comment post. As a matter of fact in mySQL you can also comment at the column level, and probably should whenever the function of a field is not obvious.
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User Interface Matters

By Colleen, on December 9th, 2008%

One of my good friends related a story to me about some of the earliest Hewlett Packard programmable calculators in the early 80′s.   When engaging in lengthy number crunching, the calculator would  print  “crunching” (or processing, or something) on the display, and every few seconds it would add a dot, so the user would know something was happening.  User feedback is always a good idea, yes?
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Using Blogger as a front end

By Colleen, on November 19th, 2008%

One of my web developer friends evolved her own custom CMS several years ago, when there the opensource CMS’s (a la Drupal, Joomla, et al) were not nearly as good as they are now.   In the past few years many of her clients have wanted to start blogs.  Writing her own blogging module seemed a bit silly in this day and age when there is so much free blogging software available.   She considered what a lot of site owners do– installing a wordpress and hooking it to either a subdomain or a subdirectory of the main client site, but it was not her choice, mainly because if you self-host a wordpress you have to maintain and update it, and most of her clients were not willing to foot the bill for their own private hosted wordpress.   She might have minimized their cost if she had them all running blogs out of a single wordpress install, but  I do not think she considered wordpress mu, or doing what I have done, which is essentially my own homespun mu setup done with symlinks.   Her solution was to use Blogger!

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How to create and maintain table comments in MySQL

By Colleen, on August 7th, 2008%

How to create, see and update table comments so your database scheme is somewhat self documenting . . . → Read More: How to create and maintain table comments in MySQL

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Feed Blitz Chiclet

By Colleen, on February 2nd, 2008%


FeedBlitz Chiclet: What is FeedBlitz? And what is a chiclet (or chicklet, as it is sometimes spelled?) FeedBlitz is an outfit that creates and manages a subscription list for your blog FREE. And the term “chiclet” has come to mean any web third party dynamic thing that does interesting Web 2.0 stuff on the back end. Usually a chicklet is visually enhanced by placing it in or on a 3-d background resembling an old-fashioned chiclets brand of gum. Chiclets has been acquired by Cadbury Adams, in case you’re interested. How it works: You tell Feedblitz the feed address for your blog. They provide a mechanism whereby people can request a notification via email –anonymously if they want!– whenever the blog is updated. Feed Blitz also supports other notification methods as well, as it turns out. Continue reading Feed Blitz Chiclet

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