I've got a question. I'm ready to do the research, but I need direction. I want to create a small, portable database using xml or docbook I think. I want my webpage: http://www.smick.net to have my writings and or tutorials visible from a xml file. Basically when you go to my writings link, the menu of my journals shows up. But it's from an xml file. When you click on a link of a story, or journal, that story's paragraphs show up.

I was thinking I could do all this from mysql, but it becomes a pain porting that from another webserver.

so I thought, I'd learn about authoring with docbook, create my writings, or tutorial modules into an xml file. Then parse that file with php into the page. Is this just a waste of time, or a pretty cool idea. Where do I go to find a way. I'm not a programmer, so I was hoping to take existing parsing code and modify it.

    Everyone seems to be into this XML thing. Which is great. But sometimes I wonder if its being used for the right reasons... :queasy:

    From my experience: XML is awesome when it comes time to make your data portable. As in allowing another site to access the data. Or moving the data to a completely different server/system running a completely different setup. Being human readable, that helps designing or rebuilding a system around the data. I'm sure this list could go on.

    Problem is text files aren't the greatest for storage. After a year of writing, think of how much data you'd have in one file. Then you have the issue of performing searches. What about ordering the content? I think this is where the database excels.

    My recommendation would be to go hybrid. Use the database to keep the data and create some code to pull the data out and into XML form for those times when you need to move or share your data... You can see this in action at http://www.rsbauer.com and http://www.rsbauer.com/rssfeed.php

      Write a Reply...