Back in 1999, I had a personal web site with a jokes section. It can still be seen over at archive.org. The jokes I collected for that site and a few others in a newer project – which never really existed publically on the web – are still around on my hard drive. The project was for a fully dynamic searchable collection of jokes written in ASP with an Access database. The jokes, 347 in all, were cleaned up semi-automatically from bad email forwards (to get rid of all that quoting stuff > > >) and categorised by hand!

Tonight, I thought it would be amusing to resurrect the database in PHP with MySQL and after about 30 minutes work the first results are live. The DB itself was exported from Access to a text file some time ago (the timestamp on that file is 29/07/2001), so I simply had to import into MySQL via an upload through my web based DB admin tool. My favourite category would have to be “OneLiner”. Although some of the jokes are quite crude, they actually took a long time to find. I did try to select only those jokes which made me laugh, so it’s not just a random collection of all the jokes I could find.

So how do you see anything? Well until I get around to doing something more with it, just scroll right down to the foot of the page and you’ll see a random “oneliner” from that old DB. Remember, I warned you that some of the jokes are crude and since they’re so old you’ve probably heard them all before!