Martin Geisler Online

The news-system, the scripts, everything is working. I’ll explain how everything works later, for now you can take a look at the source.

This should work. I’m testing my new news-system. If this works, then it can’t be all wrong :-)

I’m currently working on a new and improved version of my news-system. The current system is based entirely on text-files. Why did I choose to use text-files, instead of entering the news into something like phpMyAdmin, you might ask. The answer is simple: I can use Emacs to write the text-files, but would have to use a browser (like Netscape) to enter the information into phpMyAdmin. And the current system works beautifully. I now have about 85 text-files in the include directory, and the page is still rendered pretty fast.

But using text-files isn’t the smartest way to store data. If I had stored the news in a database, I could search them easily or group them into different topics.

So, I had to find a way to bridge the gap between Emacs and the database. The solution, what I’m working on right now, is to write a text-file, parse the file with PHP and put the results into the database. That way I can still use Emacs to write the news, but I also get the fancy features of the database.

I’ll let you know when it’s finished, so you can take a look at my code.

For some time now we’ve been connected to the Internet by the Danish provider Stofa. The connection is done via a cable-modem, so we can get a throughput of about 100 Kb per second. That’s not so bad :-)

The only problem was that Stofa didn’t have a flat-rate solution. But they have now and it’s called FlexRate. With FlexRate you can download up to 2 gigabytes every month for just 200 Danish krones (approximately 25$). Today we pay about 450 Danish krones a month (about 55$).

So, now I just cant wait to the new subscription is active!

PHP Weather will now calculate the relative humidity for you. It does this by using the temperature, and dew-point.

This also means thay you ought to be using at least version 1.17. I know the version-number has been incrementing pretty fast lately, but as you already know this is open source software, so user requests will be implemented as soon as I get the time.

And don’t worry, your old scripts will still works with this release, so there’s really no excuse for not upgrading :-)