So I am redesigning my site using Flash MX.

My question is this: I want to put a journal/blog/whatever you want to call it on there, in addition to my other content. I am trying to figure out the best way to do it, without making updates a major pain in the patoot.

My Current Site uses XML with Flash to make my content dynamic and editing fairly easy.

Here is my concern: Since my journal content will be cumulative and not an updated file. I don't want to have one enormous file that contains all of my Journal content. Is there a good way to structure something like this? Can you reference an external XML file from within another XML file to make a pyramid-like structure?

Should I even use XML? I was thinking of doing this with some kind of database, although I know jack about creating a database, let alone the PHP I would need to use with it. I'm not afraid to learn, but I want to know a good way of doing this, so as not to hack it together and not learn anything. I was wondering if I could get suggestions from you on how I should structure this for ease of updates, and speedy load times.

Thanks in advance for any help.

my personal recommendation would be to go ahead and impliment a database for your journal. the main reason for this is that you can easily limit, query, etc the table so that you aren't going to pull lots and lots of data in at once.

basicly you'll need 1 database that contains one table that has a timestamp for when it was placed in, and an entry field for the journal. my first question though would be what you have access to on the server hosting the site. if it has php and mysql, i could easily give you the commands to set up the table and the php to spit out the xml version of your journal, but you'd need to be allowed to do that on the host.

i think jerkstore's website pulls from a db into flash for the entires. i personally haven't implimented one myself, but it's not something that is horribly hard to do, and it's deffinitely worth learning.

Thanks for the response mosquito! I was actually wanting to go the database route...like you said, good to know. I have already set up mySQL on my hosting service.

I am on a linux server, and I have both PHP and mySQL. I went through the short tutorial mentioned in this thread by stinkfist, on setting up a table in mySQL. This is all good, and I understand the basic principles, but I don't know the first thing of querying, or management.

What i was wanting and going to try to build was a user/pass protected page on my site that had a couple of text inputs (either HTML or flash) that I could just type my text/image URLs in and it would update the table for me.

Thanks again!!!!

well i can upload sometime this week the php the drives the weblogs on burntmedia. i'll pull out the multiuser aspect of it so that you don't have to worry about that. already have the input field for adding text, etc etc. also look into phpMyAdmin. i didn't start using it until after i'd set up about 5 or 6 databases and 12 or 13 tables, but because of that i knew what was going on.

I'll keep an eye out.

thanks again