Finally, I found free time to go back to my bibliography/note taking program. I had built in very basic functionality that allowed me to use it to write at least one or two papers last year. But I had dreams and this past week, I got started on those dreams, beginning with adding the ability to store documents related to the record. I am hoping this feature, which after a week of tinkering and getting help from the web and my husband, will help eliminate lots of paper and also consolidate storage of research documents.
Currently, the digital documents I use get stored on my hard drive along with the paper in which I used them. From there, they become part of the archive for each class. But I obviously refer to the same articles across classes and will need them for my lit review. So it only makes sense to save them in the database along with the record, quotes, and notes. And, I am happy to report, now I can.
Besides my husband and several books, I found two websites particularly helpful: PHP MySQL Tutorial and Joao Prado Maia’s tutorial at O’Reilly Network.
I went through a couple iterations, starting with independent pages to view and download the documents, but now, after you upload a document, you can link it to a record and from the View page, download the document. So, I’m going to stop coding and start entering!
Oh…I also learned how to make URLs appear as hyperlinks. (Found the code here.) At this point, besides some cosmetic stuff, Noter is everything I imagined when I started this project in August 2004. And I think I even understand a little about PHP after all this! In fact, I was surprised how easy it was to fall back into coding after a nearly six month hiatus.