New today over on the O'Reilly Network is an article about Managing Images With a Web Database Application. Basically, how to use and abuse a database to make it a kind of "file system" for all of your important files. For example, say you have a download site, and you want to mask the download so that people can't just link right to it - they have to enter an email or something. Well, by using a database to store the file and a unique ID to reference it - and volia! Instant happiness. This article talks more about using it for images, though. They give you all of the code (of course) and the SQL to build out the database too. They store the image data in a blob - which is odd. I've always heard to just "let files be files" and not try to put them in a databse, and that it only complicates things - what about you guys?

Also today, from the folks over on SitePoint, we have a new piece covering Building a Usable Site and the steps that this author went through to get there. Unfortunately, there's less and less of this going on these days. I run into people all the time that design in IE and for IE and don't really care what else it looks like. Either that or they have broken links all over the place and don't want to bother to fix it correctly. The author gives some good ideas about how you can test just a little bit, and make worlds of difference by fixing what you find. And my favorite suggestion of all: "Never stop testing". I've broken things too many times to count, and it never fails - it's like a chain reaction. I break one thing, fix it - and it breaks another. Oh well, c'est la vie....