I've been using RateBeer to track beers I've tasted and how much I liked them. This is helpful to pull up on a phone in a restaurant or store. But it relies on their database; if they haven't heard of a beer (and I don't want to do very cumbersome editing to add it on the fly), I can't rate it. Untapped seems to have a larger database but a terrible mobile site.

Fundamentally, this is the wrong approach for me anyway. Sites like RateBeer and Untapped exist to collect and aggregate user-contributed content. I don't care about that. I'm not interested in "social beer". I just want to keep track of things I've tried. And this isn't really just about beer; in days of yore when I bought more books on paper, I wanted to be able to look up what I already own while standing in a bookstore, but GoodReads is not really the interface for that. Similarly, keeping track of board games I like (and variants) is not really a job for BoardGameGeek.

What I need is my own private little database, with a web front end to support both queries (searches) and data entry. I'm the only user, so I don't need anything fancy. (Web, not app, because while I'll do some data entry on the phone, anything non-trivial is going to be done on a computer with a real keyboard.)

This sure feels like a solved problem, but I'm not quite sure what to search for. (Or rather, my searches are leading me to pages like "how to use .NET to build your web form".) My web hosting comes with CPanel links to set up both MySQL and Postgres databases. I think I know the basics of raw HTML forms but I don't yet know how to hook one up to a running database, nor how to access-protect it. I'm comfortable with the SQL to create and query the tables, and while every database is a little different on this I assume I can figure out data import from CSV.

Or maybe I should be looking for something hosted, like Google Sheets but for an actual database. (I've tried importing this data into Google Sheets. Using that on my phone is pretty terrible and it doesn't really support search anyway.) So long as I can export data from someone else's service, I don't need to self-host. But if self-hosting is easy I'd prefer that.

Out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT, and it gave me some PHP with a username and password baked in and a suggestion to do better security. The code doesn't do quite what it said it would do (based on inspection), but it's broadly plausible and ChatGPT even pointed out the problems with security, input sanitation, and validation.

Any advice from my readers?