Creating multilingual websites by Colin E.

System Testing with PHP by Colin E.

Juggling Simulators - An Introduction by Colin E.

Learn to Juggle 3 Balls by Colin E.

An interview with Ben Beever by Colin E.

The Internet Juggling Database has been online for just over one year (or at least it was when I first started writing this article!). To mark the occasion I decided to throw together a few words about how the site came to be, partly as a thank you to the people involved and also because I wanted to put it all in writing before I forgot any of it. This article also contains a few statistics and some notes on the more technical side of its creation in answer to some of the emails I have received from interested visitors to this site. Currently I am experiencing a creative low, part of the problem is that I have less time available to work on the site, however, in the few minutes I have to spare, I am finding myself stuck for ideas. If you have any thoughts or suggestions about how the IJDb might be improved and expanded - please let me know!

The IJDb timeline:

Feb 2001

Fuelled by the success of my first two websites, Colin's Trick of the Week and the Virtual Juggler homepage, I was keen to start a new project (hopefully one with a longer life span!). Having started learning Active Server Pages (ASP) I was keen to use my new skills and create a database driven website in the hope that this would make maintenance easier. I had the ideas and the motivation, the one thing I was lacking (like so many websites) was the content.

March 2001

Scott Seltzer had already compiled a huge database of online juggling videos a fantastic resource where juggler could locate videos of world record breaking juggling and other feats of skill (and lunacy). Scott kindly offered the use of this database, so it was with a little effort, and the help of some online tutorials, that this site was born. It was at about this time that the important question of what to call this site was addressed. Scott suggested the name 'Interactive Juggling Database', which I tweaked slightly to give the 'Internet Juggling Database' (the name and style of writing the acronym mirrors the Internet Movie Database - IMDb). To this day I think Scott prefers the original name, I have also noticed a few other variations on the theme, the International Juggling Database seems quite a popular one.

April 2001

Many people find juggling clubs through the internet and at this time the most up-to-date listings were being compiled and edited by Mini Mansell. On contacting Mini I was happy to discover that he was already converting his HTML pages into Excel spreadsheets in readiness for placing them into a database. I suggested that maybe the IJDb could be the club listing's new home.

It was about this time that I decided to create a links section, after all what website is complete without one?

May 2001

I made the decision to drop ASP as the server side language and use PHP instead (which stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - yet another one of those smart-alec recursive acronyms!) with a mySQL database. I would strongly urge anyone using ASP to make the switch to PHP.

The articles section was added during this month to give the IJDb some more substance and to hopefully increase the amount of time visitors spend browsing the site. I originally hoped that articles would come flooding in and that the IJDb would become something of an online juggling magazine, but perhaps I was being a bit over-ambitious!

Tarim agreed to become the Events editor for the IJDb resulting in a sharing of information between the JIS and the IJDb.

The IJDb finally went public this month within the UK based email list, uk_jugglers. The reception it received was very encouraging. The site however, was lacking a permanent home, being hosted on an old 486 PC I had in the office. I decided it was time to fork out a few pounds and purchase the domain name jugglingdb.com and a hosting package.

June 2001

At the start of this month the IJDb was finally unveiled on rec.juggling. I was happy with the response, the site was well received by everyone, if a little disappointed at the lack of fanfare! This month saw a lot of activity as people from rec.juggling offered articles and other ideas. I also started to notice that people not only found difficulty in remembering the name 'Internet Juggling Database' but also the acronym IJDb was being similarly customised, IJDB, iJDB, IJD … tsk.

July 2001

The IJDb slowly started crawling up the rankings in the popular search engine Google with 5 other sites linking to it.

The IJDb moved servers early this month. I was already finding the service provided by the commercial hosting company sadly lacking - as is often the case. John Kennett from the server co-operative, Crosswired, offered to host the IJDb within his server space. The speed of the site increase dramatically and the site has lived there ever since.

This month I undertook one of the biggest developments for the IJDb, the rec.juggling portal. The software I wrote was heavily based on the Newsportal code written by Florian Amrhein, I simply (!) added mySQL database support in order to archive past postings, produce statistics and ease the tracking of discussion threads. I did not get much sleep this month!

August 2001

This month saw the arrival of JuggleWiki, the highly interactive resource which is virtually a web site unto itself. If you have not visited this part of the site, I encourage you to check it out. The content of all the pages can be edited by any visitor to the site, allowing the content to grow at a rapid pace. We have Scott Dossey to thank for this masterpiece.

September 2001

This site's performance on Google for the keyword 'juggling' had been growing rapidly, with the IJDb now ranked at position #4.

The IJDb rec.juggling portal was finally completed with visitors to the site now able to post messages via the members' login.

October 2001

A vendors database was added to the IJDb using code modified from the Juggling Clubs database.

January 2002

Ben Beever kindly agreed to allow the IJDb to publish his book, Ben Beever's Guide to Juggling Patterns. After many hours of work, chapters 1-3 were made available in the articles section. The other 3 chapters are still to be completed. Is that a volunteer I hear?

February 2002

This month my life became much more busy, having started a new job (previously I worked at a Leeds University - the life of an academic leaves more than enough time for activities such as web site development!). As a consequence, I feared that I would not have much spare time to develop the IJDb further. However, most of the sections of the IJDb are easily managed and have editors appointed, so the site has not suffered. It is just a little frustrating on the occasions when I cannot find enough time to even read rec.juggling using the portal I created!

However, it was around this time that another I was approached by another volunteer, Steve Carter, who created the IJDb chatroom, giving site member a much more interactive experience.

May 2002

After quite a few months of inactivity on my behalf, it was an email from Nils Cox who asked if he could translate this site into German, which spurned me into action once more! I had originally suggested the idea a number of months ago. I had realised that most of the text from the IJDb was stored in a database. In order to make the site multi-lingual, these databases simply (!) needed translation, with all the PHP code I had written remaining unchanged. With the sheer quantity of text in the IJDb databases, I wasn't really expecting anyone to volunteer for such a mammoth task. When Nils volunteered, I just had to start writing code again!

The German translation of the IJDb was ready to go online in a matter of weeks. Within a few days of the German site going online I had a volunteer for Spanish translation, then two days later a volunteer for French translations followed by Catalan and Italian!

A fitting end to the IJDb's first year online.

A few site statistics

I have always enjoyed statistics (doesn't everyone?) so I thought I might share some of this years site analysis. Unfortunately the script which analyses the IJDb's log files broke a while back and I do not fancy leaving my computer on for a week in order to load the ~200 Mbyte log file which has built up over this time. However, like all good webmaster, I have a backup! I have been counting the number of sessions (i.e. the number of individual visits as opposed to page hits) the IJDb has each day. The results are shown in the graph below:

Not the exponential explosion of traffic I was hoping for, but a steady increase all the same.

I have also been keeping track of the number of records in each of the IJDb's main databases as shown below:

All the major databases have shown some growth, with the members database showing the most dramatic increase. I am sure that Scott Seltzer will be disappointed to see that his vast Juggling Videos database is no longer the largest within the IJDb!

Finally, for the past few months I have been recording the number of visitors viewing the site in each of the languages available. As expected, visitors viewing the site in English are in the majority, however I would expect the other languages to start seizing a greater majority as search engines start spidering the site in other languages.

The code behind the IJDb

On several occasions I have received emails from visitors to this site who are interested in how it was created, armed with question like, "what languages they should I learn?", and "where did you learn to program?". Unfortunately I am usually a bit to busy to give an in-depth reply, so I thought I would take this opportunity to expand upon my replies. If you are interested in web site design plain curious, this may also be of interest to you.

The language most people learn when they first start creating web sites is HTML (HyperText Markup Language ) and I started down the same route. This simple language describes the layout and appearance of individual web pages, from the text they include to the positioning of images. In order to create a web site using HTML documents, all you need is a text editor and a list of HTML 'tags'. When you have a collection of pages, these are sent to the host web server and visitors to the site are able to view each of these pages exactly as you created them. Nice and simple.

However, this simplicity is at the cost of flexibility. If for example your web site contains a list of juggling clubs from around the world. As people email their details to you, this list my grow to contain many hundreds of clubs, each with descriptions and contact details etc… The job of keeping the large quantity of HTML pages this site would require up-to-date would soon become unmanageable.

The answer to this problem is to use a server side language which enables the dynamic creation of HTML documents. If that last sentence makes no sense, I will try to explain it more simply …

HML documents are essentially static, not in the sense that thy don't move (they may contain any number of hideous animated GIFs!), but in the sense that there content does not change. As mentioned before, the visitor to your site sees it exactly as you created it.

With server side languages pieces of code can be inserted in amongst HTML which can perform calculations, execute loops or any other function usually found in a programming language, outputting the result in HTML format to the computer of the person visiting the site. The file they receive will look just like any other HTML document, with static HTML and the dynamically generated HTML looking no different.

So what are the advantages of creating HTML dynamically using a server side language? Going back to our example of a web site which contains a list of juggling clubs, on your computer at home you might maintain this list using a spreadsheet or database. If it were possible to placed this database onto the web server and extract the data from it dynamically using your server side language, thus generating the HTML pages the visitors view, the amount of time spent manually creating HTML pages would be reduced dramatically. If a new club was added to the list, or some details changed, the database on the web server would simply have to be replaced with the one containing the new details and the dynamically generated HTML pages would change accordingly! Fortunately interfacing between server side languages and databases is very common and quite n easy process to learn.

Interested in having a go at creating a dynamic web site? Then you are probably wondering what to do next. First things first, you will need some server software to develop on. This does not mean you need to go out and buy a rack-mounted server box, you just need to download the software that these machines use. For PHP, I would recommend downloading PHP Triad, it's a simple install packadge containing PHP, mySQL and Apache, with the great little tool PHPmyAdmin thrown in for good measure.

Server side languages, such as PHP and ASP are quite a bit more complicated than HTML, so if you have not already had some experience at writing simple computer programs then I would advise you to spend some time learning this first. Get yourself a book on BASIC, or even better, C++, and learn the basic structure that computer programs adhere to, once you have learnt one, you will pick others up quite easily.

Once you feel at ease with writing simple computer programs, get yourself a good book on web programming. I purchased a book on ASP when I first started learning about server side programming and even though I am now a firm fan of PHP, I still use this book quite often because many of the concepts, such as database connectivity, are the same. I have not read any book on PHP, but I can highly recommend the Wrox Press series from having read a number of their other titles.

Finally, make good use of the many web sites containing articles, such as PHP Builder, and Script Libraries. Although when you get a great piece of code, don't just stick it on your web site, take it to piecse to find out just what makes it tick - and don't forget to credit the author, or at least send them an email to say thanks!

And one last point, what is the single word of advice most commonly offered to people in rec.juggling? ….. practice.

Regards,
Colin E. - Internet Juggling Database Webmaster