Monday, December 11, 2000

 

9:58 p.m. I'm deep in the middle of a new thing, and it's a good place to be, what with listening to the Supremes and waiting for Chief Big Deal to come down and tell us what kind of country we're going to inhabit for the next four years. Waiting and waiting and washing and scrubbing and ... life goes on ...

And I'm going down, deep deep down into the inner sanctum of: the Database. I've been researching electronic storefronts. Because of a nice response over at the Shadow Lawn website, I can't help but notice that if I were in a position to actually *sell* books, in addition to making books ... well, I might actually be in a position to earn my way in this world.

So, the glorious escape of research. I'm looking into packaged storefronts and shopping carts, and in the course of things I keep running into people who use FileMaker for such projects. Turns out that I've always been very close to buying and trying FileMaker, but things just haven't worked out.

For one thing, I've had a long, stable relationship with HyperCard, and I didn't want to stray. I'm sort of a one-database woman. The image to the left is a screengrab of part of my massive writing database. It's something I created from the ground up, and it worked very well in its day.

But, of course, nobody uses HyperCard anymore and worse, it's black and white -- I colored in the edge with Photoshop just to brighten the page a little. It's time, of course, to move on and the very clever folks at Claris let you download a complete FileMaker program to play with for a month before you have to decide. So, I did and I am. Deciding.

The free download necessitated a quick run to the bookstore, of course, to find a book, any book, on FileMaker and I was lucky to find the only one in the store. Actually, Igor spied it on a bottom shelf after I'd just about given up hope and I grabbed it and lugged it home.

It's one of the big honking ones, a full two inches in height, so I'm going to have some extreme reading ahead. And if everything works out, before too much longer I'll be able to announce the grand opening of my very own bookstore on the web and I couldn't be more excited.

I've always wanted my own store. I've always wanted to live above or behind the store. Now, with this newfangled technology, the store can be open 24 hours a day, just like the 7-11 or WaWa, but without the Slurpy and the ominous notice that the cash register is mostly empty and the poor clerk doesn't have the key to the safe in the back.

There's still plenty more to learn, of course: how to run credit cards and compute state tax; how to create all the electronic files that people seem to know and love ... how to keep track of all that and also track returns and things like that, and that's of course, where the big book of all things Database comes in.

It will save me. I will have an inventory and eventually a cash flow. No matter who becomes president, I will have a safe harbor and a lifesaving bobbing buoy if, after all this, there's a deluge.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got nearly 800 glorious pages to read before morning. Rain is predicted.