Creating a Blog

[Gerbilkit]

I am working once again on PHP/MySQL. And I decided to revive my old project of trying to code a blog. Problem is I'm not sure which direction I should go. Previously I stored articles directly in the database in text format. But now I am wondering whether it might be better to create a file to store the articles in and load them into a template with a PHP include statement.

Any feedback or advice would be appreciated.

[tdnxxx444]

Storing in database is better from a maintainability and extensiblity standpoint as its easier to add fields and tables later on, as long as you have you have your database properly designed and normalized.

[Gerbilkit]

It just seemed like it would take up more DB space, which can be limited at times. Oh well I guess I'll keep using this. I'm not the greatest at normalization and the like but I keep learning. :)

[neylitalo]

Well, let's put it this way. 50 MB would be extremely small for a database. Let's go mega-ultra-extreme and say that the database has a storage overhead of 10 MB, so you've only got 40 MB of room for storing blogs. The Dilbert blogs I looked at (the only blogs worth reading, IMO) were averaging just under 3000 characters. Just for the fun of it, we'll say your blogs are 4096 characters (a nice round number) and that you're using ASCII and not some funky character encoding. So your blogs are 4 KB apiece. 4 KB / blog, 1024 KB / MB, 40 MB total storage space - it all adds up to 10, 240 blogs. Enough for 28 years of blogging.

In summary, use a database. You've got nothing to worry about.