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Re: NFC: Revamped gallery

At 09:42 AM 5/18/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Tim Ayers wrote:
>
>> As part of the never-ending improvements to the NFC website I have redone
>> the NFC gallery at http://nativefish.interspeed.net. The content is the
>> same, but I hope you find the new version better organized. Comments are
>> always welcome.
>
>Tim,
>Great work!  I prefer this over the old frames-based version,
>definitely.  It's nice and simple, and the "jump" section at the top
>nicely organizes everything at the top of the page without the need to
>scroll.

Thanks.

>I noticed the URL now points to a Perl script.  Is this page created
>on-the-fly or something?  Just wondering what the Perl script is doing.

Yes. It is created on the fly and cached, so most of the time there isn't much
calculating going on.

The gallery now resides in a home-brew pseudo-relational database using SDBM
and string concatenation. (Your talk of getting us access to an RDB really
perked up my ears.) Having the pictures organized into any kind of database
makes maintenance of the gallery about 4x10^13 times easier. I wrote a little
CGI DBA tool to allow alterations and I will write a new utility to simplify
adding new pics.

>If I can offer a small suggestion for improvement, would it be possible
>to arrange the families alphabetically to prevent excsessive need for
>eyeballing the page?

That's a good idea. I went back and forth. Currently the families are organized
in the same order as presented in Peterson's and other lists of fish. But since
most of us don't have that memorized... 

>Other than that one small nit, I really like what you did, Tim.

Thanks again. It's fun. I just wish I had access to the web server error logs
on Interspeed.net to assist debugging. =:-o So I use a private server for
development and then move it onto the NFC account. At that point there usually
isn't much to go wrong.

Hope you have a very nice day, :-)
Tim Ayers (tayers at bridge_com)
Norman, Oklahoma
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