Site changes improvements?

The scratchpad facility available to all users has now been updated such that you can keep your notes private, rather than having them be publically visible.

I've also started reorganizing the database tables to make them more sane.

Right now we have a main "users" table which has username, email, password, etc. Unfortunately it also contains things like "want to view adverts", "external CSS link" - things that really belong in a "preferences" table.

Even worse we don't use UIDs for users instead almost everything is keyed on a text username.

These are things I wish to fix.

It'll be a slow job, but most of the code is now nicely structed in an OO fashion so it should be possible to migrate things one field/table at a time.

Yesterdays change of the scratchpad was a good testing ground - I mananged to move all the text into a dedicated table without too much effort.

Times like this I wish my SQL-fu were stronger..