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Previous Entry.. Next Entry.. Strange Naming Conventions
January 24, 2009 16:57 Most of this goes on behind the scenes, but you might occaionally glance at a URL and wonder where the heck did I come up with the name of the page or script. Sometimes, I manage to confound even myself, but I will try to trace back the origins of some of the names you might see, and others that you don't. Visitors. These are what I call people who VISIT the site that have accounts. Those that don't have accounts are called Anons. But why call them visitors instead of accounts. And on the page I actually refer to them as profiles, which actually makes more sense. But visitor is the standard programming reference I use everywhere. The reason for that is because several years back before anyone had accounts, I had a manually edited visitors page. One for people that had visited the house, and one for people who hadn't but sent me pics. You can view those original pages here for house visitors and here for site visitors. Anyway, as I adapted these pages to a dynamic format, the visitor name carried on. My obsession with the DAT suffix and use in other places. dathtml and .dat specifically. .dat is, for all practical purposes, my own personal filename suffix. .txt is used for unformatted text files. .xml is used for xml formatted text files. And .dat is binary files. If I don't put the .dat suffix on it, or some other suffix, then I'm not using it in any of my programs. Anyways, with regards to dathtml (which is the Webcam Management Page), I originally stored all the webcam data in a text based file which I would manually change as I added external webcams to the site. After about 20 of these, I realized it was going to be more trouble for me to do that than it was worth, and so I created a binary format and a page to edit them. I renamed the file webcams.dat and as I needed an html editor, I called the page dathtml. That name has just stuck ever since. In programming, most people like to use i,j, and k for counter variables, I always use x,y, and z. if I need more, I encroach upon w,u and v. s and t are always strings, except sometimes I use t for the time variable. If I need several temporary strings, I'll use s1, s2, s3 and so on. I especially do this if I'm parsing a few words out of a string. If I'm parsing a large or unknown number of words from a string, I use a array of strings called words. There are others I'll get to eventually.
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