Starting to play, finally, with MySQL and PHP. I’ve always been a “client-side guy” whose hands rarely got dirty with the server side of things. Sure I’d played with , and some ASP and PHP, but nothing much.

So far, I’ve got a couple tables created to house the site’s content, a CMS front-end, and some rudimentary templates.

If things work out as planned, I plan on:

• using inline comments (as opposed to the pop-ups in Living Can Kill You);
• offering dynamically recommended links;
• creating a more flexible glossary and tips (for searching and input);
• categorizing blog entries;
• reorganizing the content categories;
• having the site’s content available in a variety of formats (HTML, XHTML, RSS, XML, text, etc.);
• and finally, moving most of the preference controls from the client-side to the server-side.

The last item will, I hope, improve the sites performance, keep the changes persistent from page to page, and make maintenance easier for me. An added bonus for doing this: the preferences will be available to more browser. Currently, these preferences are written onto the page, and controlled via the W3C’s DOM. While powerful, it is unfortunately not consistently supported by the modern browsers.