So one of the biggest reasons I want a blog is to keep a record of things. My life, mostly. But lately I’ve either been to busy to post, or I’ve been using Twitter to record my daily doings. I’m not doing a very good job or recording much of anything here.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a database-driven website where you can record just about anything, and view stats and numbers associated with those records. For example, as a personal project to better learn PHP and MySQL, I’m creating a site where Ally can keep track of the books she’s read. I’m making it expandable enough that eventually, multiple users will be able to use the same site, see what other books people have added, and associate those books with their own accounts. By “associate” I mean that they will be able to add it to their wishlist, or they can mark it as “already read” and put it in their archive of completed books. They’ll be able to pull up all sorts of numbers and stats, see graphs of books completed within a date ranges, let the site choose their next book for them based on any number or criteria, and so-on.
But I’m digressing a bit. The point is that it will be a simple website, and it’ll only take a minute to enter a new book you’ve read, yet you’ll be able to get all sorts of rich information out of it. I wish I could recreate this site for about a million different things, not just book reading.
Baby steps. I don’t have the know-how to create an infinitely customizable site where users can create their own set of record keeping data based on whatever’s important to them. Yet. Someday. For now, I just need somewhere to put things so I can easily “remember” them later (i.e. use a search bar to find them).
I have therefore decided to use this blog as a device for just that: record stats about my life. And to start, I’m going to create a post that simply records the bands I saw last night at the Guster concert. Utilizing tags, I’ll be able to later pull up posts for all the concerts I’ve been to (starting from today).
If I had started this about 8 years ago, I wouldn’t have to guess how many times I’ve seen Guster. “Was last night 10 or 11? 12 maybe? ” No more wondering.
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