Well, back to work a bit, anyway. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the U.S., so I’m not likely to do much more until next week. But I’ll be heads down on it, then, working to get the search site done.

Before I talk about that, though, I realize that I forgot to post the link to my slides from PGWest. I actually posted them before the talk, I just never got round to mentioning it here. So, here it is:

I’m pretty happy with how it came out. The organizers shot video of it, too; I’ll post a link or embed when it drops.

Meanwhile, I have returned to work on the search site design. How do you like it? The pages I’ve completed the design for are:

• Search/Home Page
• Search Results
• Extension documentation
• Distribution information
• Owner information

Imagine if all open-source PostgreSQL extensions were posted on this site. You could search through them all, including their documentation, browse their docs, find related extensions, and see what else the extension owner has worked on. All in one place, without downloading anything. That’s the plan for this site. Notice anything missing you think should be there? Let me know.

So I’m going to start work on the app to create this now, but before I do, I wanted to point out the PGXN project wish list wiki. Folks have been having all sorts of ideas for features that would be great for PGXN, and I don’t want to lose track of them. So if you’ve had any ideas at all, no matter how big or small, please feel free to add them to the wiki. As the project progresses, some I might be able to just build in, but others I might want to see go onto a project road map. What do you want to see on the road map?

Oh, and if you want to see your extensions on this site, please do register a PGXN Manager account. Once your account is approved (and we’re pretty quick to do so), have a look at the how to and release your extensions on PGXN today!

Let me tell, you, that’s a lot easier than it sounds. After browsing through images returned for queries such as “pixin,” “pig skin,” “zen,” “zen stones,” “pixies,” and god knows what else, I finally focused on “database icon.” This was much more useful, as I hit on images such as the one to the right. Pretty standard database icon, right? Three disks stacked up. I’m not sure why this is the classic graphical abstraction for a database, but I’ve seen it a zillion times. So often that it’s a cliché.

Much more interesting was stumbling onto the icon to the left. I love how three disks have been broken down to their simplest possible representation. Because I’m familiar with the cliché, I can see at a glance exactly what this icon is supposed to be. So I thought that might be useful to use.

Searching for “extension icon” was a bust. Most of the relevant images, like the one to the right, seemed to be related to Adobe Extension Manager (try to find a link for that!). I didn’t want to go near that, of course. But, inspired by the CPAN logo, I searched for “library icon.”

Bingo! I hit on the amazing icon at right. Of course! Gears make a great icon for extensions, don’t you think? This folder is like an extension library folder. So then I thought, how can I combine these two icons, the abstract database and the gear?

Well it’s simple, isn’t it? The database icon can be the holes in the extension gear. It’s punched out, right? PGXN will offer loads of database extensions to download (we hope), and when you use one in your database, PostgreSQL will, you know: turn the gear. It just fits.

Strongrrl created the logo and type treatment based on these ideas, adding the tilt and the figure/ground reversal, and I really love it. It’s a really great logo for a database extension site. I imagine I can use variants of this throughout the final design.