I haven't posted for a while for a few reasons. First, there are only a few videos and they're still on the camera. Second, we've been traveling a lot -- two weekends in a row in San Diego, then several days up in the bay area where Kristen went to meet up with a friend in Napa and we saw both of her parents.

The third reason is I've been pondering redesigning the website, including the back end database, to allow for postings of videos and a more unified commenting system. I have the database schema written down on paper in third normal form, and it is making me wonder if in this case it would be better off just making it second normal form since almost every query would require a join of some form. For the sake of "good practice" I'm leaning towards 3NF. If you don't know what I'm saying, please, carry on. I've also been reading about URLs, specifically how they should be static & useful, something like how wordpress gives you a URL with the date & title in it. I do like this in theory as a nice separation between the actual content requested and the back end system used to provide it. Why should the URL have a parameter which is an auto-increment database field? I suppose an integer is slightly better than using some giant hash (check out the URLs facebook makes when viewing photos). I think it makes a lot of sense for viewing things like videos, albums, and blog entries -- but I'm not sure about photos. The problem with photos is I'm not going to take the time to create a meaningful title for each one, so I'm left with using an number the database made up or the filename or some other random even more meaningless name. I'm leaning towards just using the filename as the title and hoping that for a given date I don't have two conflicting filenames (unlikely). The last thing I've been pondering is the use of AJAX and the dreaded hash tag for making URLs. HTML5 offers some new capability there with pushState/replaceState/onPopState. I'm debating if I want to 1) use an existing javascript package to handle state changes, 2) code it up myself and only support HTML5, or 3) code it up myself and support both HTML5 and legacy using hash tags. I think the first step to making that decision is to download an existing package and read over the javascript to see if it's simple enough for me to recreate on my own. And this is how I choose to spend my time away from work.

I almost forgot! Spent some time down at the beach the past two days, only a couple hours while we had a babysitter that was previously scheduled for watching Adam. It's been perfect beach weather here, and it proved to be a very nice relaxing time.