I just finished putting the finishing touches on what I consider to be an acceptable version of the new Mullenweg Home Page. I bought the domain a while ago (because you know it would have gotten snatched up otherwise) but haven’t done much with it except put my senior pictures in a subdomain. However towards the beginning I built a database schema for all the genealogy information my sister seems to be obsessed with now :). Anyway once all the data was in the database it was a nice project to create a frontend for it, complete with tons of useless trivia about each entry.
I’m also quite proud of the entirey CSS based layout that it’s done in. I’ve dabbled quite a bit in CSS in the past, but this is my first abandonment of tables in a production design. You can also do some cool things on the Site Prefs page using some fancy javascript and alternate stylesheets. Try it out!

As it stands right now you can browse everone in the database by surname, and the narrow down into their individual information. On a person’s page it has some more useless links to people with the same first name, middle name, born in the same year, etc. etc. This was a very good exercise in terms of my SQL chops, as dealing with dates that occur before December 13th, 1901 forced me to use native SQL functions as opposed to PHP. Here’s my favorite query from the whole thing:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, ‘%M %e, %Y’) as nicedob, DATE_FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob)), ‘%Y’)+0 AS age FROM people WHERE DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), ‘%M’) = DATE_FORMAT(dob, ‘%M’) ORDER BY DATE_FORMAT(dob,’%d’)
That’s the query on the front page that grabs people’s birthdays. Am I a geek? Oh yeah ;).