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Date:      Fri, 17 Jan 1997 14:45:46 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To:        Ade Barkah <mbarkah@hemi.com>
Cc:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, freebsd-www@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Test CGI interface... (was: Re: cvs commit: www/data comm...)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.95.970117141501.22331H-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199701171321.GAA16031@hemi.com>

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On Fri, 17 Jan 1997, Ade Barkah wrote:

> 1) Set up a database locally (Postgres 95 v6.00 beta), and moved
>    the gallery entries into the database. I've thought about having
>    them in a simple hash, but I think a full database will be useful 
>    (for instance, the commercial entries can just be added as another 
>    table.) 

Another plus is the possiblity of a simple remote administration. 
The gallery submission form could put the entries directly into
the database, but with a "hidden" flag set.  The maintainer could
quickly query those with that flag set, verify the entries and
clear the flag.

> a. I chose Postgres, but mSQL is likely sufficient. Regardless, this 

For this application, I'd strongly put in a plug for mSQL, or
even a perl script that chews up a one-record-per-line flat file.
Postgres is quite a load for such a small application; the
startup overhead is in particular is a killer. I have a service
on my machine that uses postgres and I sure can tell when
somebody hits it without looking even looking at top!
(http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/mapfinder, this databse
has records for 310,000 items, and one table with over 1 million
entries.)

> The sorting order doesn't fold case, so "AZ" is lower than "ab". Also
> doesn't handle names starting with "The" properly.

The cgi could suck the results into an array and sort using its
own algorithm.

> create table gallery (
>    organization varchar,
>    description varchar,
>    url varchar,
>    category varchar,
>    contact_email varchar,
>    date date 
> );

I'd add another date field "checked".  We should be either
manually or automagically verifying the entries periodically and
that could be useful.

Now for the bad news: This scheme presents some problems for
mirroring.  Unless the system can be easily duplicated (not
likely considering many mirrors won't even run cgi scripts), it
will be yet another portion of the web pages that people have to
trek all the way back to freefall to get, which is something to
be avoided whenever possible.  Heck, I am at a well connected
site in Indiana and have a hard time getting through sometimes!

This does not necessairly mean ditching the database idea. 
Rather, it means generating static copies of the pages during
daily regeneration process.  Of course, could still a problem for
people who want to mirror the web source and generate their live
pages locally.

Something to think about.

-john




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