Adding a Watch Wearing Log to This Site
Everyone knows I'm a watch geek, but I've now taken it one step further and added a watch wearing log to this site.
Ok, so what am I talking about here? Well, you know how I’m a watch nerd, and have my collection listed on this site? Well, I decided to build upon this by adding a random watch picker, and watch wearing log too.
Pretty simple, right? But building this whole thing proved to be far more difficult than I first thought. Here’s the steps involved in making this work:
- Take my watch collection and exclude and watches in the “Sold” section
- Of those watches, pick a random one
- Display that random watch on the
random-watchpage - Check if the person visiting the pages is logged in (I.E. me)
- If they are, display a button that allows me to “wear this watch”
- If they’re not, hide the “wear this watch” button
- Include a button to “try again” if the random watch isn’t appropriate (for example if I’m working in the garden that day and it chooses a dress watch)
- When I click the “wear this watch” button, write the watch name and the date I wore the watch to a text file
- Parse that text file and display the date and watch name under the log section
- Make sure the watch name links back to the appropriate watch within my collection
See, there’s lots going on here, right? But I’ve managed to come up with a way to get it all working as it should. Thank goodness for PHP!
All in all the snippet of code that does this is a little over 100 lines. This is probably small fry for many of you developers out there, but I’m not a dev, so I’m very proud of myself for working this out. Yay me!