The Making of Entlist

Overview

Entlist is primarily a database of entertainment listings. It functions similarly to a buliten board program allowing for users to post/edit/delete messages. Users and visitors can search, browse, group and filter the messages in various ways. Specialized features include, self-serve user account administration and time sensitive displays. For example, today’s event listings are displayed at the top of page while old listings are sent to the archive.

The interface is strictly web based, meaning, all user interaction is handled through the web browser and viewed as web pages.

The homepage of Entlist is an entertainment magazine that would be generated from user preferences, such as, home city and favourite genres of music. Fans, artists and promoters could participate in providing content by submitting show reviews, creating fan pages or other user driven content.

At the back-end of EntList, editors would be compiling entertainment listings from various sources, including, web trawling programs (regex - regular expresion parsing) that would acquire data from disparate sources, such as artists’ collectives, independent theatres and other venues.

Web App vs. Web Page

EntList users can sign up for a member login that provides them with their own private area and extra privileges to perform tasks while logged in to the site. Providing this kind of service, takes the web site from mere web page to web application (web app.)

For Entlist, I manage the user session with the browser cookie and a server-side routine, called EveryClick. Every time the user clicks a link on an EntList web page the application layer checks the cookie to determine the identity of the user and responds by createing a web page specific to the user and the request.