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#1 haku

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Posted 05 April 2008 - 03:30 PM

I'm putting this in here because I think its a general question. Its a programming question, but not specific to any language.

I made an AJAX photo album recently, and now I'm building a bit of an application around it. The photos are going to be organized into albums. Where I got stuck is at how many characters I should allow in an album description. I have no idea what is a reasonable amount. I've thought 1000 and I've thought 50 000. Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

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#2 Karl Buckland

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Posted 05 April 2008 - 06:17 PM

I suppose it depends where you're storing this information. If, for example, you are using a MySQL database, and you decide to store the data in a TEXT column, then I think you get 65,000 characters. There are data types which give you less, or you can usually specify an amount for a data type that allows it.

QUOTE(benbramz @ Aug 17 2007, 07:44 AM) Ive noticed that quite a few people are now adding quotes from the board into their signature. I think its started an new web-radiance craze.. :P

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#3 Catalyst

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Posted 06 April 2008 - 02:25 PM

This article on Mr T bringing a kid out of a coma is 800 characters.

Personally I'd pick 500 as I think something longer would be put into a blog post that links into the album, but I don't really know what your application is going to be like so it's a tough call. If you were going to tell a whole story about a trip you took in the description then maybe you'd want something larger.

Counting characters with textarea fields is going to require some javascripting. The other thing you might consider if you really think length might be an issue is saving the album information in an XML file. That way you don't have any length limitations.

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#4 haku

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Posted 06 April 2008 - 06:43 PM

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I'm not as worried about using up server space as I am about just having a clean looking title page, so I think I'll go with 1000 characters. That Mr. T article was perfect to get a feel for size.

I've used PHP to check the number of characters, but I will definitely add a javascript check over top when I am done!

<a href="http://www.jaypan.com" target="_blank">Jaypan</a>
<a href="http://www.dudes-japan.com" target="_blank">Dudes Japan</a>