So I chip away at this little website in between trying to earn a living. What have I learned in the past few days?

Planning is always a good idea. When I started i wasn't too sure where I was gonna go, so stuff gets thrown in ad hoc.

In a related vein, that is, of planning, in the beginning I was going to use Datamapper here, and i've playing with that for a couple days. You should plan if you're going to use Datamapper, or any other ORM for that matter, like IgnitedRecord, which I was also looking at. So, since I'm so bad at planning I'm using neither for the time being.

For the the chronic poor planners out there, FormIgniter comes to the rescue. It really is cool, especially for the MVC newbie. If i need a new table, FormIgniter gives me the model, view, controller, and helps, if only by repetition, of ingraining the MVC approach to things. The generated code gets my head going in the right direction to whip up something suitable pretty quickly. That's how I finally got the links section going (and some stuff prior to that).

Also wrote a little log class that logs all hits and provides a count of article views. Woohoo. I'm gonna hook that up with a geolocation class I wrote a while back. Soon, maybe. 

Beddy time...