Comments

I think i'm going to have to reengineer my commentary system. It works rather well on the "front-end", but not on the "back-end". That means the system you all see and use works and looks good, so I don't want to change that. However the back-side is the database and code that runs it. The database can probably handle what it is dealing with now, but the code doesn't work well for it. There is no filtering or archiving going on. In otherwords, if I don't manually delete entries or move them to an archive database, they will stay accessible forever!

I have to admit that this is a bit of a daunting task for me. I'm not great with databases. Luckly I have those resources at work, but those guys are pretty busy working on our new .NET application. Perhaps they'll enjoy the change. I'd do most of the work myself, but their thoughts and feedback would be a tremendous help.

The reason I'm kinda freaking about this is two reasons:

1. I cheat and view all comments at once. Rather than clicking each comment link and seeing if someone said something I just view this page. It lists all the comments in the order in which they were made. Unfortunatly it lists the article by Blogger number, which isn't a lot of help to me. It also lists ALL comments, from today to the first comment ever made. I have a fast server, so it doesn't take too long to display all this, but I'm really only going to be interested in reading perhaps the past weeks worth of comments. Maybe I'll make an interface so I can choose date ranges.
   
2. I want to put my commentary system on my other pages as well. I'd like to give site visitors the ability to comment about each piece of art and my tutorials. Since the current system uses Blogger codes to work I will either have to fake the codes on my gallery pages or build a totally separate system. What do you all think about this idea? Do you think it would be a worth while exercise? The art site that I post to from time to time, Renderosity, has a nice commentary system and gives people the ability to rate pictures too. If I put that in place then each blog entry could be rated as well. Not sure if that's a good idea or not yet. I'll have to think about that some more.
   

This is a big project! I was hoping to work on it this past week, but things at work have been VERY VERY busy and they will be next week as well, so when I get home farting around on my website isn't something I'm really all that interested in. Maybe I can do some of that this weekend. Keep your eyes peeled!