It wasn’t the authors page I was supposed to make, it was the Libraries page. Every manuscript is located somewhere and it seems the easiest part of the process to tackle, because it is simple. The other parts look like a headache, because each manuscript can have several parts that can each refer to a different epic, and they might be in poetry or prose.

It would be very convenient if every library in the world had a unique identifier associated with it. I could use that as the key to the database. Because it doesn’t, I have to make up my own that will only be true for this site. I’d rather use something an international body agreed on.

When my father wrote this, he wasn’t thinking in terms of database, so it is difficult to organize. It is also written in French, because it was dealing with Medieval French Epics. I don’t read French, so I can’t just look at what he wrote and figure out what is going on. It looks like a lot of the data uploading will need to be done by hand. Thankfully my father is onboard and looking through it.

I’m making progress on the PHP side. The hardest part is getting used to using a non-compiled language. If this was C++, it would happily inform me that I haven’t declared a variable, or I forgot a bracket. PHP is only processed when it is opened in a webpage. So if my code has an error, I won’t find out about it until after I run it. And then there seems to be a dearth of error messages. And if I accidentally misspell the name of a variable, the page will assume it is a different one.

Blech!

I should look into getting an IDE for this. That might make life easier.