[phpgrabcomics-announce] Alright, I got it working

[Jim <jw2...@oh...>]

Andres:

	the .htaccess problem was what was messing *everything* up.  Works like 
a champ now.  If you update the .htaccess file, you should be OK.
	After looking at how it's put together, I have a few ideas:

1)  Put all of the configuration settings in the database.  This would 
greatly streamline the installation.
2)  Instead of using your own tmp directory, use /tmp, the TMP 
environment variable on Windows, or we could find a way to do without.
3)  While we're using the database, we might as well store the comics in 
there.  MySQL can handle BLOBs in the database: we could just retrieve 
the comic and put it in there.  Also eliminates another chmod.

	All of this would make the installation much better.  Any problems / 
issues with any of this?  If not, I'll get started.

	It's odd to me that phpGrabComics leads this dual-life of RSS feeder to 
the original sites and local storage: seems that that should be divided 
some other way.  IMHO, I think phpGrabComics should either provide the 
RSS feed or get all of the comics for the system and not both.  If it 
were up to me, I'd strip out the RSS part (no reason to hose their own 
when they can just get to yours for no effort) and concentrate on 
getting local comics.

	I think people use the RSS feed, even with its limitations in comics 
now, because a) getting a server up and running is too hard and b) the 
client for viewing the comics is pretty clunky right now, killing the 
incentive to install your own.  After a better installation, I'd like to 
create a new client for viewing comics: it has to be easier to use (AJAX 
would be great here) with more preferences for how they're viewed (you 
have a zillion comics, but people would sure probably like to select a 
subset of those for viewing).

	In short, I'm going to:

1)  Come up with a better way to install this thing
2)  Come up with a way to put stuff in the database so we can solve the 
"do a chmod first" problem with the install files
3)  Write a way to configure "preferred" comics to select through: those 
will be the only ones that are actually used.  Changing "Enabled" to 
"false" probably isn't the best way to do this  :)
4)  Once I get all of that working, I'll write PostgreSQL support in. 
It's not so important to me since I had to put MySQL on another server 
anyhow, and I'm just currently running it from there.

	Comments?  Criticisms?  Let me know.

Jim