learning

It's been three years since I've seen my second quilt, Star Stories.

I always have a fear of looking at my finished work. I can always find the mistakes, and in Star Stories I know I made many. I've learned a great deal since I made it, but it was the quilt that sparked my interest in using reclaimed, shared, and repurposed fabrics. Forget what's "expected." In this case, sentimental value was more important.

The quilt was displayed at Lexie's wedding reception, even though it wasn't finished; I raced to get it completed and sent off, and in my haste I never thought to get a straightforward photo of it. (What can I say? It was only my second quilt. I had no idea I'd stick with this hobby.)

Trust me, it’s funnier if you know what’s been going on the past 24 hours or so.  The short version is that those of you wanting to jump the gun and position yourself for the goofy madness that is the Quarto unveiling can go to the registration page and sign up to be a registered commenter.

("But, Mom, do we have to?")

Of course not.  But it means that I’ll be a sweetie, and run the nifty little script that marks your old comments as belonging to your new account, thus tying your personal info provided in the comment to the contact information in your account.  (In other words, change your contact info in your account, and all your old comments reflect the change.  Databases kick ass.)

Righto.  So let’s take a moment out from the coding and talk Quarto for a minute or two.

Good day.  Productive day.  The install script is totally happy.  I have user authentication working properly.  Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  In fact, it very nearly drove me batty this afternoon.  I was taking working code from another section and reworking it to fit the user authentication section, and no matter what I did, things just didn’t work right.So I started testing.  Authentication worked properly when I tested it on the username field, but not on the password field.  Sure, ok, I must be munging something somewhere.  I kept testing, and it still wouldn’t work.

In more desperation, I ripped out the entire section of code and started over.  From fresh code.  That I knew worked.  It still didn’t work.

Sure, I know that mySQL’s my weak point, but this was ridiculous.

So here we go, eh?

I’ve been saying for quite some time that I planned on writing my own CMS.  I think at the time, everyone was kind enough to say that yeah, I could probably do it—with the unspoken caveat that I had a lot yet to learn before I’d be able to complete such a thing.

Let’s just say that in the meantime, I’ve been studying.Many months ago, I confessed to a friend that in my dawdling moments, I’d sketched out the basic idea for a database that would work well as a content management system for a site like cat.net.  He said, so why not follow up on it and write it yourself?

I didn’t have a good answer.  Mostly because I had a pretty good idea of how arduous it would be (hi, Noah!) and that I wasn’t entirely certain of my capability to finish such a thing.