Recovering From The KnowProSE Quote Book Endeavour

The KnowProSE.com Quotation Book was an endeavour I had been planning for quite some time; with almost 10,000 quotations on the site it was getting really difficult for me to hunt down the right one when I wanted it - which sort of defeated the purpose. It was a pretty interesting thing to do as well; taking Drupal where it hasn't formally been taken yet in condensing material from other pages in single pages within an online book. Pretty intense, and in true programmer form I wasn't conservative about how long it would take.

Doing it by author, I thought, would be a fairly simple process - and it was, to an extent. But it was slow, and when I realized that I had about 2,000 different authors (!), I quickly started looking for shortcuts. Of course, I had to go through some of the quotations and fix characters here and there that morphed from their original special characters (read: foreign language) into question marks. Ugh. But, once I started dealing directly with MySQL, things started rolling much more smoothly. It always pays to have lots of tools in your toolbox, and getting creative with MysQL saved me approximately one metric buttload of time. Bonus: It's always fun creatively using the tools at hand because you learn more about the tools and more about what is possible. There were INSERTs, UPDATEs, and all with WITHs or LIKEs or strange combinations of the two, and tossing in some PHP to write the SQL was fun. Harrowing at times, but fun. Remember, kids, always back up your database before you go fiddling under the hood.

And it's still not really done, but I met the goal. Every author is listed. *Recovery time* is now in session, allowing me to catch up on all sorts of things (except, perhaps, sleep), and since it's a public holiday - something Catholic, I think, so happy religious holiday... (Easter? Dunno...), the phone shouldn't be ringing. Therapy time.

Writing, power tools, varnish, and copious amounts of coffee.

If you find errors in the quotes, or if you want to make additions - use the comments on the appropriate pages within the book. And if you, for some reason, have problems logging in - or using the site after logging in - please try hitting refresh in your browser if you log in. Because of the loads of traffic the site has been getting over the last few days, the site is caching pages to minimize stress on the servers, which also want a break after having over 2,000 pages added to the site in less than 48 hours.