It’s the middle of the night, and I cannot seem to find sleep. It’s not like I am not tired, mentally, but sleepy? For some inexplicable reason, the answer is “no”. I have absolutely no clue, but experience shows that the longer you stay up, the better are your chances to find peaceful sleep. Now, getting up in the morning is a totally different matter.

So, I figured, now that my web server is back up, I could post a little note on what I have planned for this website. Ah, yes, I am really getting into coding with PHP. And I love mysql. It’s totally amazing how much easier you can make your life with so little code.

If you’ve been around for a year or so, then you will remember that my website was mostly static. Sure, I updated it now and then, but not very often, and above all, everything was done manually. I shudder at the thought of manually editing my Euro coins collection; or even this news section. Impossible. Yes, Zope would have let me do all these things. A database is a database. I meant the principle behind it.

So where are we headed? I will slowly expand my codebase and turn my scripts into a sort of basic CMS. There are many software suites out there these days that claim to be CMS, but few deliver, and none provides what I want. I do not like the Slashdot approach – I mean, /. is fine for weblogs, but if you re-implement slash please do not call it cms. Blogs are at best a subset of CMS. I do realize that I will probably never achieve anything like it, but if I had to give an example of a website that I would like to "emulate" then it would be news.bbc.co.uk. Something like that, just a little bit more generalized.

But enough about the long-term idealism, Nils. What concrete things do you have up your sleve?

I’ll really have to work on the **admin frontend**; right now, I edit and maintain my data with phpmyadmin, which is really not a good long term solution.

I want to offer **subscriptions** to users – Basically, I plan to send out emails in regular intervals to notify users of new or updated stories, and I want to change the homepage so it can display “news since your last login”. The basic framework exists, and I do send out emails to a few test users, but this part needs a lot of work before it is done.

The **image database** already works pretty well, but it needs to be extended. The zoom view needs to be improved and show some data about the picture displayed. I need to finnish the auto-creation of thumbnails, too. Also, I need to store photographer information and a timestamp with each image.

I also need **better topics**, including a tree-like structure, the ability to assign multiple topics to one article, and also the ability to categorize other things – like images or links – via this hierachy of topics.

Last but not least: **Article parsing.** Right now, articles are pretty much taken as-is from the database, and output into the html code. Formatting inside the articles is done by including html tags in it. Needless to say, this is a really bad idea, so I need to come up with some sort of metalanguage. My first goals are basic formatting, links, and also the ability to include images (inline) in an article. Should be reasonably easy.

This should keep me occupied for a while. Don’t expect a lot of these features to pop up all of a sudden, it will be a slow process and improvements will appear gradually.

If anybody has any clever suggestions, feel free to contact me (see link below). I appreciate all feedback.