On with the quotations obsession project. I swear, it’ll be useful for something other than keeping me busy. Someday!
Does anybody know PHP/MySQL well enough to help me do that?
Anyway, one reason that I keep going is little successes like the one I just experienced.
I love research, and I’m attempting to find information on every single author (8,353 at this very moment) and some kind of citation, preferably original, for every quotation (34,444 of them). Yes, that will keep me busy for a while. The fact that many people cut-and-paste bits of text from all manner of sources, then lump them all together with little or no attribution, makes me crazy—especially since it seems that vast numbers of people conflate Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior and Senior, or Alexandre Dumas père et fils.
Anyway, there’s one quotation credited to “Milton Acorda” all over the internet and in many books: “Without freedom, no one really has a name.”
Other than the one sentence, the man doesn’t exist. I’ve looked for him several times, to no avail.
I don’t know if the book I found in Google Books wasn’t there before or what, but tonight I happened to search on the quotation itself again, and voilà! It’s the last line of a poem, “Proposed Dedication for a Monument to Lount and Matthews,” published in the book More Poems for People by Milton Acorn.
No, my work isn’t going to end world hunger or anything like that, but I find it satisfying. And every little win helps my overall attitude, which isn’t really positive most of the time lately. Now if only someone would pay me to do this sort of thing!
What kind of help do you need with PHP/MySQL?
I started this thing thinking I’d stick the quotations into a WordPress plugin, something like Quotes Collection (which does almost everything I’d want in such a plugin, and I may still use it for that purpose). It’s gone way beyond that now, and I’d like some help to put it online. The only other person with whom I’ve communicated who did something similar put every quotation into a separate blog post, and that’s not what I want to do.
I know WordPress and HTML and *some* CSS. I’ve modified a few php scripts, and I can pull stuff out of an SQL database and otherwise monkey around with it, but I don’t know how to design a DB well, or how to put all these things together.
I took a required database course at Devry, and a web development course at SPSU, but neither were actually useful in the real world.