First query engine is free

“Oh dear God. The db people got to you”—said Danno, upon learning of my current activities.

“Crack dealers!” I said.

“When they say ‘the first query engine is free,’ that should be a tipoff…”No kidding. So here I am, sitting here, helpless, a junkie looking for her fix and staring this error down: “Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in…”

I omit the rest. Why bore you? Suffice it to say that I finally swallowed my pride and started hammering on database stuff today. Just a teensy little table, I said, just one, and I’ll see if I can make it do what I want it to, and maybe I’ll branch out from there.

“Crack dealers” is about right. Here I am, several hours later, so close to getting this to work that I can nearly taste it…and alternately wanting to do something else and wanting to do nothing but this. I’m finding that I remember more from my collegiate coding classes than I’ve given myself credit for.

SQL I remember. PHP I’ve been learning. Making tab A fit into slot B, however, has been a bit of a challenge. That is, if you define “a bit of a challenge” as banging my head against my monitor enough to a) draw blood and b) make myself forget that my left ankle has been sore all day.

“Just one little table,” I said—one little table to drop in random information about musicians I like, along with a short bit of commentary and links to the band’s official site and their listing on allmusic.com. Just a little something that I could pull from to create another sidebar choice…

Oh. Maybe I should explain that part. See, when the crack dealers have really gotten to you, you start thinking things like, “Oooooh! Having a skinnable blog isn’t enough.” *takes big hit off of crack pipe* “Why not create a new skin where the user can select from a series of sidebar items and customize even the content? Hey, it’s possible with a bit of PHP form handling, cookies, and crack-induced mojo!”

Madness, I say. Addictive behavior if I’ve ever seen it. Denis Leary says that pot smoking leads to carpentry. PHP and SQL lead to scary websites. This is bad. I think I’m a danger to my own website.

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