Not counting vacations (and even counting some of those) this past week seems like I've been away from the web more than ever before. I guess I was ready for a little break, and then my monitor situation gave me the excuse. I read Bruce Schneier's new book "Secrets and Lies" which isn't really meant for me, but was fairly interesting nonetheless. Mostly though I've been thinking about what I'm always trying to think about: the next version of the mythic "perfect web publishing system." Of course this beast doesn't really exist because "publishing" means so many different things. Anyway, it's been a productive week. At least in my head. This slashdot article about this project aiming to make mySQL into file system really got me started. I'd always wondered about this possibility, but since I'd never heard it mentioned I figured there was some basic problem that I wasn't seeing. Maybe not. Now I'm thinking about my project under the name FFS (for Fluid File System - I stole this from someone posting in the slashdot thread,) or alternately as VSFS (for Very Slow File System) just so I remember the main problem I am facing. One quick (although slightly misleading) way to describe what I'm thinking about is to ask this question: What if every Get request to your web site (no matter what the URL requested) 404'd, except instead of serving a static page informing the surfer that the page couldn't be found, the 404 page is a script that parses the path info (of the requested URL) and uses the directory structure of the request to form an SQL query on the database and return a page with posts that seem to fit the request? Hmmm.
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- jim 1-21-2001 4:42 pm