geeky
lisagail will be happy that I've finally found something in my life to database: archived lj entries of course! why didn't I think of it before. the rather ridiculous non-existence of basic database functions on the lj site, plus a healthy fear that one day they might erase all my entries, has spurred me to download my whole journal month by month.first I downloaded it in xml format just because, well, you know: all the cool kids are playing with xml these days and as I have never really learned it I spent two hours reading up on it on the web and discovering that FileMaker Pro will only read xml that it itself produced (unless one wants to go through one's xml files to make them conform to their grammar which would kind of defeat the purpose of downloading them in xml to begin with) and that firefox needs stylesheets at the very least to render your xml and I don't feel like drawing any up for lj xml and I don't know if firefox also needs a dtd to render it and I don't feel like drawing any up for lj xml AND there is of course no mention of dtd's anywhere on the livejournal site but that's not too surprising and so I gave up on the xml and just downloaded all of 2001 in comma separated text files.
which work wonderfully with FileMaker Pro as it turns out. in about five minutes I had all of 2001 in a labeled, searchable, sortable, printable database. I made 228 entries that year.
I could export this in xml now if I wanted to go on in that direction for fun but really do I need another learning project? is it clear why I never finish anything?
on to 2002!
