Easing back in

[tinyjo]

ASP.NET is turning out to be fun, and I'm doing it in C# as well, just to keep things interesting :) It's actually pretty nice, as long as I remember to capitalize things but I don't think I'll bother switching my own website over. I'm feeling pleased with myself because I got my butt in gear and got down to the gym this lunchtime to do a bit of swimming and sign up for Combat class on Friday. Back in the groove, hopefully.

I don't update the "Currents" section on the right hand side (see http://www.tinyjo.net/journal/ and then you'll know what I mean) nearly often enough so I decided over the holiday that I need to implement some kind of online updating system. Options I have/am consider(ed)(ing) are

• Create an LJ for it and then embed it using an S2 style*. I decided against this in the end because the load time for the stuff I've got embedded atm is not great
• Put the stuff in the database and access it with ASP code. Not bad potentially but it does mean doing DB access on a lot of pages where I don't currently. On the other hand, it's nicely searchable and categorizable.
• Put it in an XML file and access it with ASP code. Faster load time than DB (I assume) but less searchability
• Write ASP code to update the static files. Probably best load time, but no searchability

I can't decide whether searchability/sortability are desirable functions to have really. I like the idea of giving everything marks out of ten and then having a high-scores list but do I really need one? I suppose if I'm going to get into that though, it doesn't need to be there at all, so there's no point in considering that. Help me decide, please!

[Poll #170582]

* I have discovered a nice little hack - the equivalent of customview for S2 (appending s2id=XXXX to the URL) works for free users as well as paid. Which means that I could create a free account and embed it using a style created with my permanent account. It wouldn't work for the comments pages unless you wanted to try to embed those as well (don't, really) but this wouldn't have comments enabled anyway.

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

The hack is temporary - it's in zilla to be fixed.

Just so you know.

I'm in training for PCC stuff, and i'm bored, so i figured i'd say hi. hi.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough. I keep meaning to look and see if there's been any decision about how to handle embedding long term in S2 - do you know?

Also, what's PCC?

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Peer Computing Consultant. I'm a labsitter who checks on printer paper and helps people who can't figure out how to copy paste and so on.

I don't know about any long-term embedding solutions yet.

[shepline.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment, but something that will update automatically from somewhere rather than handcoding html/xhtml sounds good to me.

If you do work out a way of doing it (relatively easy) is there any possibility of you sharing the knowledge...? —or is that just too damn cheeky of me?!!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Well, there will be handcoding involved no matter what option I choose. Once I've got it set up, I'm more than happy to share code. In fact I'm happy to share all of the utilities on the site (e.g. the quotes stuff). About the only thing I wouldn't give away is the style sheet (which would be easy to duplicate if you knew what you were doing anyway).