Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I can't believe I only just thought of it. My Set Dancing Music Database has its sets and CDs referenced on the URL line by the internal database IDs. While this is unique and easy to link to, it looks pretty useless if you're sending the link to someone. I realised this when writing my post on my experiences at Naughton's Hotel I wanted to link to my page on the South Galway Reel Set and thought "how dull is that?"

Suddenly I realised that I should do what wikis and most other good content management systems have done for ages - made URLs which reference things by name rather than number and let the software work it out in the background. Take the name for the set, flatten it into lower case and replace spaces with underscores; it would also be easily reversible. CDs might be a bit more challenging but there are only one or two that have a repeated name, and I'd have to handle such conflicts anyway at some point.

That combined with my planned rewrite of the site to use some sane HTML templating language - my current choice is ClearSilver - so that it's not all ugly HTML-in-the-code has given me another project for a good week or so of coding. Pity I'm at LCA and have to absorb all those other great ideas...