Lone Star Internet, Inc.
developed the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site out of a love for
the Texas outdoors, the responsibility of capable internet design
firms to aid in providing content to the online community, and as
a chance to show off some of our development talents.
The following
is a description of the application that produces the site
and allows us to maintain it with relatively
little effort:
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The
Flower Database: |
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We developed
a database of flower genus (scientific) names, common names, descriptions,
growing locations, pictures, and possible misspellings. Using this
database we developed a web interface for adding and maintaining
the database. All of the flowers pages, including the main links
page and all of the flower detail pages are generated by our publishing
software using templates and the information from the database.
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The
Sightings Database: |
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The sightings
are generated from the "Share Your Sightings" form on
the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site. The form information is posted
to a sightings database and an email is generated to our reviewer
that a sighting has been submitted. Using our administrative interface,
he reviews the submission for language and layout, researches and
inputs responses to some sightings, then posts the approved sightings
to the database. Using our publishing software, the sightings are
added in date order to the sightings pages and using our flower
database, the full text of the sightings is examined for flower
names and links to the flower detail pages are added automatically.
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The
Publishing Software: |
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Using the LSI
publishing software allows us to maintain current, updated information
on the web site without using dynamic web pages. Dynamic content
web sites perform a database query each time a page is requested
(well - not exactly true, some dynamic content web sites load the
pages into memory until the information is updated - if you have
a lot of pages that are accessed regularly, this requires a lot
of memory). Instead, we publish large amounts of data in static
standard HTML format, which the web server can very easily serve
to our visitors. We use the web server for what it does best, serving
web pages. After updating the databases, we simply re-publish the
site (takes about 30 seconds to republish the site).
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Lone Star Internet,
Inc. has been providing web based solutions for the corporate community
since 1996.
If you are interested
in learning more about Lone Star Internet, Inc. click
here.
I hope you enjoy
the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site as much as we do!
Very Truly Yours,
Ken Biggs
President
Lone Star Internet, Inc.
Where Business Happens
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