I put together a site over the last couple of months, writing mostly while commuting to work.

The idea is simple..people rate which kitten they think is the cutest.

I know, I know, it's been done a billion times before, but it seemed like a nice project.

http://www.kittenfaceoff.com/

At this time, 90% of those photos are taken from openphoto.net (a friend's site), so they have bizarre names because I lack creativity (A cat named Face Foot?)

If you're a nerd, it's written in PHP5 (completely OO), using MySQL 5 (master / slave replication (complete with a sync detection and wait for sync)), Smarty (Templating system), completely CSS (Not one table, anywhere), Imagemagick (thumbnail resizing).

I did something interesting, all binaries are stored on the DB. This way I can load balance the site without needing an NFS mount of anything like that. Instead of reading from the DB every time an image is requested, I wrote a file caching system. So each file is only requested once from the DB.

Also, once every 24 hours I do a complete mysqldump on the slave, so I have a backup of all the data incase of a server crash.

I know it's overkill, but that's what makes a project fun.

Oh, and look at this, an AJAX voting system.

http://kittenfaceoff.com/vote/vote

(Still in testing)

Darn - I was expecting to see those creatures stuffed in a front loading washer when I clicked on the pics.

You actually created a kitty friendly web site - *Good For You*!

and

Great job on the all round site design!



I know I can look it up...Being lazy...Sooo...What's the maximum binary size limit for MySQL? Think it can handle small mpeg files??

G.

Thanks

There the limit for the LONG BLOB/TEXT type, it's 2^32 - 1 or 4,294,967,295 bytes.

So yeah, you can put pretty large videos in it.

Some people say it's a bad idea because it's slow relative to reading from the file system. But with a good caching system in place you only need to have the file loaded once from DB.

The best thing about this approach is backup. When I backup the database, all the binaries come too.

There is already something similar out there. Kitten Wars

Read the first post:
Just about everything has been done before.

LOL. . . I admit, I was expecting something sick as well, like a bonzaikitten type website. The idea of animal abuse (or child abuse for that matter) sickens me.

I love animals and have two cats myself. Plan to add two dogs as soon as I upgrade to a roomier single family home.

Anyway, your site is very well designed and the cat pictures brought a smile to my face. Excellent job.