Thanks for clicking the link to read this. Let's talk about the new laptop portal features!
100% of the specifications found within the Laptop Portal have now been moved into a MySQL database. Here's what that means:
In the future, I will be developing an advanced search that will allow you to search by specific specifications!
Laptops in the database can be assigned an unlimited number of "aliases", each of which will cause that laptop to be returned as a search result, alongside the laptop's main name in the database. This is useful where you have a certain laptop that people might search multiple keywords for. One example would be the original Gateway Solo. Gateway just called it the "Solo", as it was the first one, but the laptop itself has the model number "P3C" printed on the bottom label. Its official name in the database is "Solo (Original)", but "Solo P3C", "P3C", and "Solo" will all return it as search results.
Another neat use for the alias system is that you can search for any Dell "case model" to return all Dell laptops with that same model. What I'm talking about here is the "Model" printed on the bottom label of all old Dell laptops - "PP01L", "PP03S", and "PPL" are all examples of this. These model numbers were shared across all Dell laptops with the same overall case (for instance, the Latitude C600, C610, C640, Inspiron 4000, 4100, and 4150 are all model PP01L).
The search page has a fuzzy mode and an exact mode (default). The fuzzy mode can be used, for example, to return a list of all IBM ThinkPad 700 series laptops, which you'd do by fuzzy searching for "ThinkPad 7".
A long-time problem with the Laptop Portal has been that older pages have inconsistent styling when compared to newer pages. Now, with the exception of laptops in the "Other Laptops" section, every single page now has consistent and current styling.
Currently, any page that covered a single laptop now pulls the specification table from the database. Pages that covered multiple laptops (example being the ThinkPad 760 Series page) do not yet do this, as they have multi-model spec tables. I will be developing an algorithm in the future that will automatically generate multi-model tables, after which point all laptop pages will pull from the database.
I did take some time while working on the database to add some new laptop pages. There are new pages in the Dell, IBM, Compaq, Toshiba, and Twinhead sections. There is also now a new Gateway section (currently pretty empty, more to come!).
Probably at some point in the future, just not now.
Obviously, the new system makes it more difficult to just put up a ZIP file for people to download. The main issue is the SQL database - I need a way to share it that doesn't compromise administrator credentials (the public account only has "SELECT" permissions, so it's no big deal if that user/password was leaked). I'll look into this in the future, but for now, downloads are temporarily disabled.
Due to the file extensions of laptop pages changing from .html to .php, old links no longer work. I decided the best thing to do here would be to take the opportunity to rename the /pc directory to /laptops (something I've been wanting to do anyway), and make any www.macdat.net/pc/... link redirect to a page explaining the change. There unfortunately just isn't a better way I know of.
That's all! More site updates will be coming soon.