Blog: January 2024

Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Personal database with web front end 101?

2024-01-28 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Tech

I've been using RateBeer to track beers I've tasted and how much I liked them. This is helpful to pull up on a phone in a restaurant or store. But it relies on their database; if they haven't heard of a beer (and I don't want to do very cumbersome editing to add it on the fly), I can't rate it. Untapped seems to have a larger database but a terrible mobile site.

Fundamentally, this is the wrong approach for me anyway. Sites like RateBeer and Untapped exist to collect and aggregate user-contributed content. I don't care about that. I'm not interested in "social beer". I just want to keep track of things I've tried. And this isn't really just about beer; in days of yore when I bought more books on paper, I wanted to be able to look up what I already own while standing in a bookstore, but GoodReads is not really the interface for that. Similarly, keeping track of board games I like (and variants) is not really a job for BoardGameGeek.

What I need is my own private little database, with a web front end to support both queries (searches) and data entry. I'm the only user, so I don't need anything fancy. (Web, not app, because while I'll do some data entry on the phone, anything non-trivial is going to be done on a computer with a real keyboard.)

This sure feels like a solved problem, but I'm not quite sure what to search for. (Or rather, my searches are leading me to pages like "how to use .NET to build your web form".) My web hosting comes with CPanel links to set up both MySQL and Postgres databases. I think I know the basics of raw HTML forms but I don't yet know how to hook one up to a running database, nor how to access-protect it. I'm comfortable with the SQL to create and query the tables, and while every database is a little different on this I assume I can figure out data import from CSV.

Or maybe I should be looking for something hosted, like Google Sheets but for an actual database. (I've tried importing this data into Google Sheets. Using that on my phone is pretty terrible and it doesn't really support search anyway.) So long as I can export data from someone else's service, I don't need to self-host. But if self-hosting is easy I'd prefer that.

Out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT, and it gave me some PHP with a username and password baked in and a suggestion to do better security. The code doesn't do quite what it said it would do (based on inspection), but it's broadly plausible and ChatGPT even pointed out the problems with security, input sanitation, and validation.

Any advice from my readers?

Sh'loshim

2024-01-25 from Dreamwidth

Tags: Family & Friends

My dad's funeral was 30 days ago. For some reason, Judaism counts the first days of mourning from the funeral not from the death, even though the annual commemoration (yahrzeit) counts from the death. Dad wasn't Jewish but I am, and I find our markers in time to be helpful.

Dad was part of a small music group for many years. They were all friends, as you expect in small long-running groups, and the director spoke at the funeral. Later, when I started going through his email looking for things that require action, I found out she has a newsletter and had posted about him. I recognize a lot of that, so I think this is what she read at the funeral.

My dad made a huge difference in my life and in the lives of my mom, sister, and niece -- and I'm learning about some of the other people he also touched deeply.