Using Caspio

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Permalink Reply by John Kroll on March 5, 2008 at 4:50pm

At The Plain Dealer, we've been using Caspio for quite awhile, for everything from the serious to the frivolous, and, of course, for lots of sports.

Tips:

-- Design your results pages with relatively few categories, or you can blow out the format when you try to embed them because they'll come out too wide. Use the details pages to add more info.
-- Prepare your databases on your desktop. Editing a database within Caspio can be a very slow process.
-- Use Caspio in conjunction with your site if you can -- as we did with the Browns database linked above so that search engines could find each one of the individual stories. Using links within Caspio to info you store elsewhere -- such as in one of your blogs -- saves a lot of upload time, among other things.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Dupras on March 5, 2008 at 5:06pm

Thanks, John -- I've been checking out the Caspio work on Cleveland.com quite a bit. Are you one of the key people involved with that development?

-- Doop

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Permalink Reply by Michael Dupras on March 5, 2008 at 5:18pm

And a follow up question: How did you build the LeBron James salary calculator? I have something similar I'm trying to pull off -- a calculator that determines your property tax credit when you input your adjusted gross income and total property taxes, under proposed tax legislation in New York that would tie property taxes to income.

The formula is a little complicated, but we have an Excel document that computes it quite nicely. But I'm not sure how to translate that into Caspio. It seems you can't create an input form without it being attached to a table that would store the data? Or is it handled like a search?

Frankly, I understand better how to create my own database and build a web form in ColdFusion than how to do this with Caspio! But I'm sure it's quite easy. Got any tips?

-- Doop

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Permalink Reply by John Kroll on March 5, 2008 at 8:03pm

We've got several people who've worked on Caspio projects. Rich Exner, a database journalist, did the salary calculator, so I'll let him know you're interested in finding out more about that.

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Permalink Reply by Mary Ann Chick Whiteside on March 5, 2008 at 8:31pm

and can we get Rich to join us?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Dupras on March 5, 2008 at 9:40pm

Great -- thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Gina Chen on March 7, 2008 at 5:38pm

Mike, pretty sad I have to find out the cool things you're doing on a social networking site -- since you work right in my newsroom. (Just kidding.)

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