Impossible

I have now determined that a search engine is just impossible to make from scartch. The best i could do was an extremely slow search engine and I could find no ways to speed it up. I only managed to fix 1 out of the 4 problems because I did not understand enough of PHP and no matter how much research I did, I still did not understand. Therefore, now I will fall back on my back up plan.

That is, to use the http://tools.digitalpoint.com/site_search.php that my Aunt Heidi told me about some time ago. This will allow me to save time and work harder on the photo gallery- the more important aspect of the website

Update on Search Engines

It's going along brilliantly with the aid of the website I mentioned in my previous post. Though I had a few problems (currently i am still solving a few)

1) When I created tables for MySQL- I had almost forgotten, luckily I had previous blog posts to refer to-Anyway, the main problem was that in the tutorial it had told me to type "Type=MyISAM", but it didnt work. I thought I had made a mistake so I tried again. Nothing. So i did some research here http://www.devraju.com/joomla/joomla-1-5-22-installation-sql-problem-typemyisam-solution-enginemyisam/
and found that the word wasnt "type" it was "engine". I tried it and it worked. Thank god. It only took me 15 minutes.

So I created my tables and checked them with the Show Tables thing.

Then, I copied and pasted the PHP codes on the tutorial and edited it slightly since my username was not "root" but "admin" and I had no password. Also I simplified the first bit of the code with the help of this website
http://phpeasystep.com/phptu/27.html
It simplified the URL retrieving bit at the beginning. Right now, the theory is quite clear to me but I still cant quite put it into words. So, if i ever need a reminder, I must look at
http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Building-A-Search-Engine/
again

I did all this on my localhost/ testing instead of on my normal files because it's kept simpler this way. However, I've got a few little problems i must fix

Note to Self

http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/Building-A-Search-Engine/
Note to self- this is a really good site for search engines

Through this, i found that it was possible for PHP to grab content and put it in a MySQL table. This simplifies things.

Ehh, when i opened up my project again I saw a layout problem. So I put borders around the table to allow myself to see the problem was

Turns out it was just a few br tags. So i fixed that, and it looks round about right now.

Return

Apologies for not working for 5 weeks. I had christmas vacation (which i spent revising) and mock exams. Finally, my mock exams are over. They ended yesterday. Now, I need to face the reality of my time schedule which was destroyed by 5 week lapse.

I plan to work hard next week, which I have off due to Chinese New Year, in order to catch up. If i work hard enough, it will be possible to make up for 5 weeks worth of work.

Also, good news, Sony's warranty allowed them to fix my laptop so I have all my work back. On the last day of term, i finally had a brain wave about how to kill two birds with one stone by creating the search engine. I wrote it down on paper and I will scan it and post it here soon.


Now...Plan of Action for CNY
Day 1
1) Create search engine-1 day

Day 2
2) Upload to site and try Cushy CMS-3 hours
3) Handover to client- remember to mention missing things-day 2
4) design photo gallery-3 designs- 3 hours
5) send to client to pick-5 minutes

Day 3
6) research how client can upload-4-6 hours if necessary
7) upload to image hosts-1 hour

Day 4,5,6,7
8) create image gallery- 4 days

CNY ends
9) Upload everything-1 day
10) send to client

Oh. Yes, i forgot. The plan of action for now (wednesday) to end of school (friday).
1) More research on search engines
2) clarify ideas and theories

Update

Last night i managed to fix my code. I managed to redo half of it before I got too tired. I can work on it again tonight. I have sports day tomorrow so I can sleep then to make up for the time i used to do this project instead of sleeping.

Anyway, because my client has my laptop and i left the stuff i redid at home-I'm now forced to work on my search engine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFiRdPkJCbA

This tutorial was pretty good. I now understand what to do. I'll draw it out on paper. It's much easier that way

I give up.

I've spent an entire hour in class trying to figure out what I've done and trying to get over the depression of losing my work. So, once i got home I decided to take a good long break and get started again. I could barely make sense of my previous code. So tonight, im going to work extra hard (with the help of my previous journal entries) to reconstruct the entire website.