macblaze.ca

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
—Abraham Lincoln

If there was some philosophy I could say I truly believe in then this would be it. Likely a lot of it is that I am an inveterate tinkerer and like to take the opportunity to learn new things, but mostly I think I am a bit addicted to efficiency. A process that runs smoothy and without hiccups is one that makes me smile and if I can spend 3 hours doing something interesting and learning a new skill that will carve 4 hours off a mundane and boring task ,then the outcome is guaranteed to make me grin like an idiot.

Case in point: my boating quiz. As I had mentioned previously I felt the interface for the Slick Quiz plugin sucked, and was full of redundant entry and irrelevant info that had to be entered regardless of my opinion. Since I could build a customized entry system in Filemaker in a matter of moments, it just made sense to do it my way.

That left the issue of how to get my info from Filemaker to WordPress’s quiz plugin. A quick check revealed that Slick Quiz had made a couple of tables in the WordPress MySQL database. I exported the existing data to get a sample of the table structure and then went in to Filemaker and with (a lot of) trial and error managed to create an export file that I could dump via phpMyAdmin into the correct tables. Voila!

The Point

It took me several days of playing with variables, learning software and figuring out that special characters like ampersands and curly quotes were giving me grief, before I could get the system running. I probably could have done a whole lot of data entry the hard way in those few days, but…

• I learned new software and new systems
• I learned about the nature of ‘special’ characters in a text import/export situation
• I practiced and polished my Filemaker skills, making the next project that much easier (this is the process that had led to my ability to make a better interface in the first place)
• And last, but not least, I now have a customizable system that will allow quick and efficient entry of data form weeks and months, potentially saving me hundreds of hours over the long haul.

I’m not such a big Lincoln fan generally — I tend to feel politicians are generally less altruistic than history portrays them — but I am totally on board with this little quote. Spend some time sharpening your axe people; it is almost always the right choice.

I am going to try and add a quiz element to the blog. I thought I could do some studying/refreshing on boat related stuff and learn something computer at the same time. For now I will start with a plugin called SlickQuiz. I like Watu but the free version doesn’t give me randomization options and I am not forking out $75 bucks for what is essentially a one person project. The plan is to enter a whole bunch of questions from basic boat terminology to light and sound signals. I will then just break them into 10 question quick-quizzes and hopefully use them like digital flash cards to try and get some of the more esoteric stuff to stick. The entry interface to SlickQuiz sucks so I will start by building a database for question entry and then export the output to an xml file that I will import via phpmyadmin directly into the wp databases

Notes

• Must either delete the records first or change the id. XML import will not replace or update records; it will only add new.
• At this point  I can’t make the xml export work straight from Filemaker so I have to copy the output file manually and past it in Text Wrangler. From there I can use phpMyAdmin to import the xml file.

The Quiz page