Mark Van Dine


Small Sites


A Tiny Book Club Site

My first book club site was built using MySQL/PHP and the idea of hosting 1,000 clubs. This did not happen. My own club, even after 20 years, has only covered about 250 books ... not really a Big Data problem. I created an alternate "skinny" club site using just flat files for data, and maintain it, when we add a book/meeting, with Python and a shell script.


Search the Unsearchable

I noticed that the Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA) jobs page had only a simple, free text search capability. This is all the functionality it actually needs, but before I had figured that out, I created this add-on site that uses Python and SQLite to provide filters by Town and Position.


Blog Posts


Sudoku Solver Wed, 07 Dec 2022

The Sudoku Solver on the site lets you contribute boards to a shared public library, and lets you choose... ... Read more


Mining Words Sun, 20 Nov 2022

A favorite elementary school word puzzle is the 'how many other words can you make from the letters of this... ... Read more


Solve the Jumble Tue, 04 Oct 2022

In the "Jumble" puzzles (copyrighted by David L. Hoyt) the challenge is to unscramble a set of words.  The individual... ... Read more

A Lot of Quotes

"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind."

- Bill Moyers


A Wall of Quotes:

... using the default lit.css styling

... using Joey Burzynski's ultralight styling

Puzzle Solvers

The way to learn any scripting language, database tech, etc., is to find a simple project and implement it. This page is a set of simple projects that I used for just that purpose.