I’ve finally got the php code figured out and working more or less correctly. Still have some work to do to get all the required pages and code snippets built and tested and then put them in place.

Probably be sometime next before it’s finished but the primary obstacle has been overcome now it’s just the grunt work and fiddly bits to do.

The way I’m approaching it means I’ll be replacing all of the Category pages as well and using a php search function to pull the data directly from the database which is what I wanted to do in the first place. That way new individual books can be added once… to the database… and the proper page will pull it when the page loads. Makes everything much easier to maintain in the long term.

I’ll start working on the Category pages once I get the New Book search function pages done since, for the time being,  they will look exactly the same whether static or dynamic.

The Librarian

p.s. Thanks to all the folks who offered and provided php advice. It’s coming back to me (like a bad dream) and that helped a lot in getting my head back into the php space. .

ELIMINATED REGISTRATION

I’ve spent several days dealing with snotty emails from the email service I use for the site due to the phony and bot registrations and spurious emails that cause lots of bounces which is bad for them.

I have better things to do than deal with that kind of nonsense so, as I did with the old site, I’ve just eliminated the whole User Registration function entirely.

For now I’ve left the Comment function on and I’ll still have to manually approve them to keep from being inundated with spam and junk. We’ll see if that’s workable or needs to be eliminated too.

I’ll be working on the Book Database today and with luck might have the date based search up and running soon.

The Librarian

PHP HELP 

Looking for some PHP help. I’m trying to set up the Book Search page to check for books added since a specific date. It’s been a LOT of years since I did any serious PHP coding and I no longer have the patience I used to have for dealing with syntax errors and malformed statements. (No longer have hair to pull out.)

I need maybe a dozen and a half line of code. What I need to do is

1. ask for Year in a select statement (2024-2020)
2. ask for a month (01-12)
3. concatenate them into yyyy-mm-01
4. call another php page passing that date in the URL.

The second age making the database queries I can handle just fine. If anyone fluent in PHP could help out I’d really appreciate it.

The Librarian

NEW SITE STATUS

Managed to miss some obvious stuff. Some of the menu links were broken. I had left a Meta data block on the side bar and the Contact form was broken. Those are fixed now.

There’s no login/registration function anywhere at the moment. Seems I broke that yesterday and didn’t realize it. I’ll get that fixed this weekend sometime.

The important thing is that the book Index is working, the Category pages are working and all of the files are online and downloadable. That’s the Core function of the site so as long as that is working the rest is lower priority.

All the 301 redirects have been added so old links will work properly.

For now I’m off to bed to dream about PHP syntax and variables if I’m unlucky.

The Librarian

p.s. if you do see something not working please let me know either through the contact form or by just emailing me at librarian@survivorlibrary.com

WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE

The new site is live. Basic design and layout is similar to the old site. Minimalist since listing and downloading books is not a high tech function and doesn’t need a lot of bells and whistles to perform it’s function

Only real difference is that there are a lot of capabilities available in the new software which I have not begun to make much use of yet and the up to date software will make maintaining the site a LOT easier.

A few things are clearly different since the Category pages are sortable and have a Date Added field for each book. That will make it easier to see new material when it is added. I’m planning to add some PHP code and a new page that will let you enter a date and will dynamically show you everything added after that date. That will make Catch-Up easier. Probably be at least a few weeks before that is added. My PHP skills are not just rusty but severely corroded and need to be brought back up to snuff.

I know there are still some bugs, mostly formatting items, that still need to be addressed and I’ll be working on those over the next few days.

But the main migration is complete… for now.

The Librarian