I always had a love for animals, but especially dogs. My grandfather bought me this book (see below) from Bennett’s Drug Store in Miami when I was a young boy. I bought many expensive dog books since then but this cheap little paperback book holds a special meaning for me. I poured over this book for many hours back then. Memorizing facts about German Shepherds, Dobermans, Bull Mastiffs and many others. I always wanted a Bull Mastiff but shied away from large breeds because of their shorter lifespan. My parent’s encouraged me in everything and would take me to dog shows even when vacationing in North Carolina. My mom especially, because my dad was often working or resting on the weekend from work. I spent much of my allowance and lawn-mowing money on dog books since then. And checked out many books from the library that my mom would frequently drive me to.
So one of the 1st databases I created was dog stats. In MS-Access back then and later in SQLite and MySQL for the webserver. In the early 2000’s I was thinking of projects to learn PHP and use some basic HTML, so of course I thought of dogs. And I created Dog-Size way back then. It looks dated today. And I don’t really update it anymore because people “create” dog breeds on a whim these days. I don’t make money from it and I’m sure it isn’t accessed very often. But it was a good project to learn PHP. I wouldn’t really consider myself a PHP programmer these days. Looking back, I think my PHP code was pretty bad back then. But it has mostly been online for ~20 years at this point.
Occasionally I have to learn just enough PHP to update my code to run on newer versions of PHP.
