Thursday, June 5, 2014

Yoga, knitting and relational databases



It's around this time, late on a Thursday afternoon, that I find myself longing for the yoga mat. I do regular 10 hour shifts and often hardly get up from the cushy chair all day, and I'm losing my fitness and flexibility. I can feel it slipping away - it's scaring me. Or is it just age - this changing body shape and feel. Anyway, I started practicing yoga around the same time as I got a desk-based librarian job 2 years ago. I've never been flexible and I'm still not, but I just need to stretch everything out, quickly in the morning, and a longer session in the evening. I use Yogaglo.com - they film live yoga sessions from some of the most brilliant teachers in their New York studio, and make them available to everyone around the world (for a small subscription price). Compared to all the hassle involved in going out to a yoga class (getting changed, getting there, paying for it, being self conscious etc.) it's lovely to do at home.

The Yogaglo site sits on top of a relational database, making all of the classes searchable according to their various attributes - body part targeted, instructor, length of class, level and there are literally hundreds to choose from. I learned about relational databases as part of my post-grad library and information studies course. We had to find a website that was based on a relational database and analyse what lay beneath it from what we could see of the public side of it. I chose the knitting website Ravelry. The complexity of it almost overwhelmed me (knitters, you'll know what I mean!), but it once again sparked my interest in web design, which is my new hobby. This post started off as a whinge about librarian body stiffness and turned into a look at the relational database of a knitting website, but it's all good, right?

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