Some of you fine readers may wonder why I'm rolling my own instead of going with a pre-exisiting package. It's mostly a learning excercise and so I can practice new programming techniques (thanks php patterns) behind the scenes. This site is a convenient excuse and by-product

Anyway, specifically I've finally gotten the administration scripts I use to store data in a per-datatype table. Beforehand, every datatype (news item, topic, etc) had its data stored in a single 'records' table - a technique I'd been exposed to at work and that we use with our web content framework Syntax. However, I'd been toying with the idea of being able to put stuff in the db in a more normalized way while still keeping the flexibility of relating objects and modifying input forms.

Another interesting feature I've added is the option to send Trackback pings for news stories from the back end. My next step is to write some public code for accepting and storing trackback pings.

Thanks go out to my Dad's website for beta-testing new code for me unexpectedly . And to my colleague Ginger for letting me use her new blog to test my trackback pings.