Personal Diaries - by year!

[Pete Eeles]

For those of us that create a personal diary, I wanted you to know that you can view a yearly summary:

http://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/forum_diaries.php

I know there's a problem with certain characters and am looking into this but do please let me know of any issues you encounter. The intention is to allow users to easily create a PDF of their diary, by year. Once a year has been rendered in a browser, most browsers allow you to create a PDF using an export mechanism. Of course, the longer your diary, the larger the PDF. After some testing, some yearly reports run to over 50MB when rendered as a PDF!

The reason for looking into this is that, as some will know, we have an issue with the number of files stored on the server (the limit is 300,000 and we're around 280,000). While upgrading is an option (and a pretty expensive option at that, at over £65 per month), even upgrading will have its limits, and the website cannot simply grow and grow indefinitely. It may therefore be necessary to delete old files which, to a large degree, are attachments to posts, and these are increasingly the attachments to personal diary posts (I won't bore you with the analysis I've performed!).

If the time comes where I need to delete files, then I will let everyone know how we will move forward. Rest assured that no images will ever be "lost", merely archived. But this new mechanism will help with the preservation of personal diaries in their entirety (including images) should there be a need to delete files on the server.

Cheers,

- Pete

[MikeOxon]

This seems a good idea to me, Pete. I've just been enjoying a trip down 'memory lane' looking at my 2014 entries. I noticed one or two formatting glitches - captions on photos no longer italic and HTML appearing where I changed font colour. Also, GIF animations haven't transferred (they wouldn't work in a PDF anyway).

I do also save my posts in PDF format and see that I noted in my 2014 PD that I was astonished to find that it came to 119 A4 pages. It made a nice booklet that I gave to a few friends and relatives at Christmas.

[Pete Eeles]

Thanks Mike. Can you point me to specific posts where these problems arise? That will help me fix things.

The link of the specific post(s) (which you can find in the post title, which is probably named "Re: Mike Oxon" but has a URL of the form "viewtopic.php?f=29&t=7459&start=700#p114771") is what I need. Thanks!

Cheers,

- Pete

[Pete Eeles]

Hi Mike - ignore that request. I think I've found the problems and fixed them. If you find any other issues then let me know!

Cheers,

- Pete

[Pete Eeles]

And finally ...

I've had to remove this feature for now, since it's too database-intensive. I'll look into reimplementing this so that it is less so!

Cheers,

- Pete