You start getting the SPAM comments. Its a good thing to see, but a pain to deal with. I had to delete 15 plus comments today.
Here’s a post I just wrote on my Tumblr about Multilingual support, character sets and collating sequences. It wont be appealing to most, just programmers out there that have to deal with this stuff.
I’m not saying I want to support different languages for this application, but I just need to be able to deal with content that may contain characters from non-ASCII characters sets! Like n-tilde or whatever.
Major pain in the butt!
If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing the last several days… it been trying to learn Ext JS on my own. Not a easy task, but I’ve been making progress. Though not fast enough to suite my tastes, so I went and got some books on learning EXT JS. Will post my thoughts on them later after I have read some more. Here’s what I’ve got:
- Ext Js 3.0 Cookbook
- Ext JS in Action
- Learning Ext JS
- Practical Ext JS Projects with Gears
Starting with Learning EXT JS first…
Well, when looking for a JavaScript library to add some utility to the web site, I stumbled upon Ext JS – not only does Ext JS provide many cross browser abstractions for various DOM functions it also has this really awesome UI library. So I have decided to develop the database maintenance part of the web site completely in Ext JS. Give the Ext JS UI Component Demos a look if your the developer type.
Here’s one example of what is possible with Ext JS.
I’d like to say hi to an old friend of mine, Steve Behling…. Steve, if you read this leave a comment!
Thanks,
– Greg
Added some additional content to the web site tonight. I added a project details page that give a little more information on what the project is about and its benefits.
Trivial as it may seam I found a favicon.ico that looks like a UPC Bar Code for the web site! Yeah me!
I used to think that the name of a comic book was its Title… Like the Fantatic Four, that was the name and the collection of the all the issues was know as the Title.
But since I’ve started using various online comic book databases I’ve started to look at the name of a comic book a little differently. Many online databases refer to a comic book name as a Series and usually also include the year that the book started to be published. For example, the first Fantastic Four series is generally referred to as Fantastic Four (1961).
So what do you call it, a Title or a Series? Leave feed back in a comment.
F0r those of you who are interested… here is the database layout. Its kind of hard to read without the table boarders, but I couldn’t convince WordPress to let me override the style on the table. I’ll post it in separate file in another day or so.
| INDB_Source (unique on name; unique on base_url) | |||||
| indb_src_id | int | non null, PK | |||
| name | text | non null | name of the internet database source | ||
| base_url | text | non null | base url to used when creating absolute urls | ||
| Publisher (unique on name) | |||||
| pub_id | int | non null, PK | |||
| parent_pub_id | int | populated for imprints and brands only, null for publishers | |||
| type | text | 1 | non null | record type (default of P)
P = Publisher, B = Brand, I = Imprint |
|
| name | text | publisher name | |||
| desc | text | if not a publisher a description of the brand or imprint | |||
| compay_prefix | text | the first 6 to 9 digits of the UPC code identifying the publisher | |||
I’d like to know what comic book cataloging software you’ve used, which ones you’ve like why and why not. What are the pros and cons of each.
Also if you used any web sites to catalog your comic books — let us know that too.
I’ve purchased two software packages: ComicBase by Atomic Avenue/Human Computing and IntelliScanner Comic Edition by IntelliScanner. I prefer IntelliScanner Comic Edition because its cross platform (I’m a Mac user) and it came with a bar code scanner. I liked ComicBase as well as it comes with a huge database of Titles and Issues which is updated weekly. Though on the downside, you had to pay every year for an update to the software or else you could no longer receive updates to the database.
As far as web sites that I’ve used to catalog comic books, I only have experience with the My Collection feature on the Comic Book Database (CBDB). Its fairly rudimentary as editing issues after you’ve entered them is a royal pain. However it does have on distinct advantage over local cataloging software packages in that its available wherever you have an internet connection!
I’ll post an more in depth review of each software package in later blog post.
Respond in the comments section with cataloging software you’ve used.
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