(Incomplete page, last edited Friday, July 01, 2011, 5:58:24 AM)

Update History

I worked on Astroblahhh Desktop off and on for a long time. I first thought of the ideas for the file/image organizer and URL organizer back in December 2007, and I thought of the idea for the idea organizer in May 2008.

The Astroblahhh URL Organizer (originally called the Astroblahhh Links Organizer), Astroblahhh Idea Organizer, and Astroblahhh File Organizer were the 3rd, 4th, and 5th large projects written in PHP/MySQL/JavaScript I ever completed (mostly) and released.

They all borrow lots of code and design ideas from each other, from my first two large completed PHP/MySQL/JavaScript projects, the Astrosorting Music Organization Database (AMODB) and WordsPlatz (my blog software), and a little from at least one of my unreleased projects.

I wrote Astroblahhh Desktop mostly because I really needed it. Disorganization, exacerbated by my distaste for wasting time on half-assed solutions (not to mention my characteristic "why bother?" blues), had been holding me back for years, and Astroblahhh Desktop makes it a lot easier for me to find things.


Thanks to my ideas DB, I have some exact date/time data which is probably close to when I first thought of the idea of each organizer.

The below times might not be exactly the times at which I first thought of the ideas, since it sometimes takes me a minute or two (or more) to begin noting down an idea I just thought of in one of my official text files for ideas - and besides that, my ideas DB is pretty big, so I might have overlooked some earlier mentions of those ideas, and I also haven't looked in my old journals yet.

Anyway, though, here are some Astrolog 5.40 command lines for curious astrologers, for the dates/times of the earliest mentions of those ideas I know of so far. The longitude/latitude are for Hubbard, OH. In chronological order:

I could probably do a fairly good job of pinpointing the dates/times when I actually started working on each organizer - but, as of 6/30/2011, I just don't care enough to bother looking that up right now. Maybe someday.



v0.3

Astroblahhh Desktop was first released in a partially complete form on March 1, 2009 as Astroblahhh Desktop v0.3. It was v0.3 because the total Astroblahhh Desktop package was only about 1/3rd complete, since it contained only the Astroblahhh Link Organizer so far.



v0.31

Astroblahhh Desktop v0.31 was released March 23, 2009. I added a couple scripts to make it possible to quickly input multiple URLs - multi_link_adder.php and multi_link_adder_form.php. I updated lib-abdesk.php to make it possible to navigate to the new multiple link adder form. I also updated the readme file to add a bunch of new security tips I had recently figured out, and also to provide instructions for turning off PHP's annoying "magic quotes" feature.



v0.55

Astroblahhh Desktop v0.55 was released May 13, 2009. The major addition was the Astroblahhh Idea Organizer, meant to make ideas, to-do-list items, goals, and other random text scraps like favorite quotes, scraps of code, etc. easy to find and sort through.

I also made it so the listers for links and ideas sort things by url_id or idea_id by default, instead of by date of addition or whatever I was using before. This seems to make the link and idea listers faster. I also commented out the stuff that formatted dates more nicely, to further decrease the amount of work MySQL has to do. I also made other updates/fixes that I don't remember the details of and/or didn't bother to write down.



v1.0

Astroblahhh Desktop 1.0 was released September 9, 2009. The major addition was the Astroblahhh File Organizer, which is basically my personal replacement for Google Desktop (with one major difference being, my file organizer currently doesn't have capabilities for importing and searching the text within files), and my solution to years and years of distressing chaos on my computers' hard drives and CDs.

It was the hardest project yet. If I recall correctly, I put the most effort into it in July, August, and September 2009.

I tried to release it at 9:09 PM on 9/9/09, just because it amused me to do so, but I'm not sure if I released it at 9:09 or 9:08 PM, because my computer's clock was a bit faster than my website's clock, and my website thought it was 9:08 PM.


One difference from previous versions you might actually notice is that you now must separate different arguments in a command with a semicolon (;) instead of a comma. (This was done so you could search for tags with commas in them). Multiple commands can be separated by two semicolons (;;) or put on separate lines.

Astroblahhh Desktop v1.0 also included some update scripts for people's existing idea DBs and links DBs, mostly to eliminate the possibility of a certain very bad glitch occurring when people do tag searches that include negative arguments. This problem is eliminated by adding some indexes to all the fields of the tagmap tables.

The update scripts also added some new tag types: to/for tags in the Links DB and Ideas DB, and location tags in the Ideas DB. This makes it easier to use the Ideas DB for such things as labeling who you intend to give particular ideas to, storing emails, or maybe astrological data (even though a database specifically designed for handling astrological data would be better; and in fact I'm working on such a thing already), and perhaps other uses I haven't thought of.

I also added two scripts (broken ever since v1.12), Export Ideas DB and Export Links DB, which exported the data of your current DB in a format which could be imported into a different ideas DB by PhpMyAdmin. After you imported an exported DB, you could then use the Update Ideas tags script or Update Links tags script to make the tags searchable.

I updated the tag library so it stores less data in the session variables (though still a lot, if you have a lot of tags).



v1.12

Astroblahhh Desktop v1.12 was released December 5, 2009. You could now much more easily use multiple DBs with all three organizers (the web links organizer, the idea organizer, and the file organizer), without having to edit source code as much (though you still have to edit source code a bit).

The idea organizer and links organizer both were given mass editing capabilities, which make it a lot faster and easier to get things labeled and organized. All three organizers' record listers now try to avoid doing COUNT queries as frequently, which makes them a bit faster.

Scarily, the file organizer was given file-moving capabilities. After tons of laborious fiddling with the code for them, they seemed to work surprisingly well - except for the problem I had where, if I recall correctly, a test folder I tried to move to a different disk vanished irretrievably into thin air.

So, since I never made a workaround for that, I just made it so it can't copy folders to different disks than they're already on (even when the program is set to allow things to be moved to other disks), and the program is set by default to not allow things to be moved to other disks at all. Also, all file-moving capabilities are disabled until you turned them on. In v1.12, the settings you had to change were in lib-abdesk.php. (In v2.0, those settings were moved to settings/ ).

I restructured the databases of the idea and links organizers. This had both speed gains and losses. The drawbacks were more noticeable in the ideas DB (unless you like to search the longdesc, othernotes, or sourcenotes fields of the links DB a lot).

Browsing ideas seemed to become faster as a result, but, doing longdesc, quote, or sourcenote searches for some reason seemed much slower, with those fields split off into their own database tables. However, tag searches were (and still are) pretty fast, so if you just use the mass editor to add tags to all items found by a longdesc/quote/sourcenote search, you'll be able to find those items again later much quicker by doing a tag search.

The file organizer was given an "Export Records" feature. The button for that will be revealed when you click the File Browser button. The Export Records feature is useful if you have a ton of records in a database that you'd rather split off into a different database. It doesn't delete records, though. If you have the TNs checkbox checked, it copies thumbnail images from the original database into a folders intended for the destination database. You should rename the new thumbnails folder to be the same as the database's name, add the text "-temp" to the end of it, and put it in the folder C:/xampp/htdocs/abdesk-data/tn.

The idea organizer's multi-adder now takes multiple kinds of input. Since I'm using some ideas DBs as a makeshift way of storing astrological data, it will even partially read in Astrolog 5.40 command lines. (This is only my temporary solution until I someday make some database software which is specifically intended for handling astrological data). The links organizer's multi-adder was enhanced as well.

There's now a Backup Recent script which I made so I could back up the most recently changed records without having to resave my entire databases repeatedly.

The Links DB's and Ideas DB's export scripts are broken now, and there are various other little odds and ends that ought to be made, so, someday, there will probably be future updates.



v2.0

As I write this, it is 6/30/2011 - about 5 months shy of 2 years since the last update of Astroblahhh Desktop.

This is the first version of Astroblahhh Desktop which I customized to be able to run in a variant of Linux - Lucid Puppy 5.2, to be precise.

13:23 06/30/2011. pastloc, futureloc. Backup features, zip backup features. mirror features. 13:25 06/30/2011. the ideas db, right now, is cosmetically nicer, now there are symbols on the editor page. I would have liked to have released updates sooner, but, various things interfered, like depression, avoidance of the slow, tedious chore of programming, a computer breakdown, etc.

There might have been an update sometime in 2010 if I hadn't been heartbroken, and there might have been an update perhaps in the first half of 2011 if one of my computers hadn't broken down.



Software I Used While Writing Astroblahhh Desktop

Text or code editors: