Night Owl

Once again I execute a sortie into technological wonderland to see if I can extract some simplicities to build upon.

It always amazes me, when searching the net, that there is such a wealth of excellent software available and so little information on putting the pieces together to accomplish the kinds of useful things a working boy needs to get on with the show. Case in point--a web text editor. In searching I found a great software package that did everything I needed... but there was a catch, after probing deep into the code I discovered it really only supported ASP pages. Great for Redmond, but what about the rest of the world?

Searching again, I found a slightly less complete editor, but written in javascript with interfaces to PHP, Python, PERL and some I've never heard of. I downloaded and ran their PHP demo and it worked great! Then the catch... how to connect the editing to useful things like MySQL or even flat files? I thought I was in for another day of exploring all of the detailed coding to find the secret API, but first I applied a motto I've developed. It goes something like this: "...I have the problem, you can bet someone in the wide world has had the same problem too!"

Low and behold I was correct. Thanks to a great guy in Chicago who took the time to create a web page to simply explain the key connections within the editor to interface to a MySQL database I was able to easily use a great tool and create a better editor than I would have had time to build quick and dirty. Why is his page not in the package's wiki tutorial?

I hope more and more people will post their vital data solutions to make it easier to get the multitude of tools up and running in a simple, comprehensible manner. This night owl would enjoy sleeping once and a while.