arse.

my project, the social networking one, has ground to a halt - from, believe it or not, mental overexertion :) an ordinary social net site: fine, no problem. lots of people posting, some chat stuff, blah blaahhhh. boring.

the easy stuff we managed in a reasonable amount of time (5 weeks). user-login, forum, chat, profile, picture uploading.

now it comes to the hard part: tagging, making the tags useful, and then search on the tags.

with a fourth normalised form database (ultimate object-orientated design) it's all gone slightly crinkly. getting results out of such a database has to be done with JOINS on aliases of the same (object/table) obj_table AS column1, obj_table AS column2.

now imagine putting "please count the number of times a tag has been put onto any object" into 4th normalised form. i can't quite get my head round it. i will - eventually... just not... this... month!

i fully expect to be successful - i will just have to warp my tiny brain and wrap it around the problem several times before it all fits into place.

in the meantime i'm bouncing off the walls cos i really want to get this project completed!