One last holiday before the semester begins…puttering around the house and computer. Finally decided to work on Noter, my bibliography/notetaking software. I would like the author/keyword lists to be pull down menus rather than checklists when you enter a resource. I got the pull down menus implemented pretty easily (that’s just html) but they weren’t actually writing to the database. I think I know why it isn’t working: since there can be more than one author or keyword for a resource, they are linked to the resource through a keyword and author lookup table. Evidently, at some point I learned how to get a checklist to write to the database. But that code didn’t seem to work when I switched to a pull down menu.

So I went to a backup on DVD. But I wasn’t sure which one…I hadn’t made lists of what folders were on each DVD that I burned recently as a major archiving project. I needed to print the window but wasn’t sure how to do it. I poked briefly around the web, discovered the Automator (which I’ve seen on my computer but never used), couldn’t figure it out exactly, went on the web and watched about 30 seconds of the demo movie at Apple, and a few minutes later was printing the folder window for my backup.

What’s the point? I still have lots of learning to do about php/MySQL. I rely heavily on other people when it comes to programming. I think learning can be plotted on a continuum: basic facts (bottom up processing) leads to conceptual and critical understandings (top down processing). But I don’t think it’s a linear continuum, if that’s possible? I am somewhere in the middle of the continuum: my husband was trying to explain the logic of the code and all I wanted was the code. Surely someone else has implemented this and I know enough about databases so I can make use of already written code, just substituting my table and field names.

My quick detour to learn how to use the Automator provides another lesson about learning: sometimes it happens just-in-time…we can’t possibly prepare completely and know everything we’ll need to know before we go into a project. If you had to learn every nuance of your computer before you actually used it, you would never do anything. What you do need to know is how to find out if and how you can do something. I don’t think we do enough to educate people to navigate the help screens built into software and the resources available to help online.