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6:31 AM, Jan 20, 2006 toot this
Gaffes and Overhauls
Without a whole lot going on last night, I went to bed earlier than I have in a long, long time. I was in bed with the lights out, by 10:30 PM. As a result, I was unable to sleep any later than 6:45 AM. Yesterday, I was working like a busy little bee on some backend code improvements to this website. Through the magic of perl, I've been able to write a conversion script that I can use to populate all the content on this site to a new file format, in a new location, so the new scripts I'm working on can have some real data to work with. As I was working on one of the scripts that generates the "Latest Posts" list you see on the right side of your screen, it escaped me that the new format isn't production yet, and I overwrote the old script with the new, much faster one, that deals with the new improved format. Unfortunately, that's not what gets updated whenever someone posts a comment, and yesterday was a comment-happy day.

Nothing was completely broken, but the "Latest Posts," thing was reading off of data that needs to be manually generated. So, when I woke up this morning, I rewrote the old script, and in doing so, got some new ideas for the new site layout. It unfortunate, though, that this overhaul, the biggest change in the history of thsi website, will be almost completely transparent to you, the reader. The way that certain parts of the site work now is so hackish that I'm embarrased to have written them. The plan is to get everything to work the same, and all using perl.

But, you may have noticed, if you've been looking at this site for a while, that there have, as of late, been some major speed improvements. These have all been the direct result of the adoption of perl, for the display of almost all the pages of the site, as opposed to raw shell script, which was never meant for running websites.

Anyway, I'm going to get to work while I'm still feeling industrious.

1 comment

pldodson offered:
GREAT JOB ON ALL YOUR STORIES THEY ARE GREAT,I NEVER HAVE A BAD DAY SINCE I HAVE BEEN READING YOUR ARTICLES !! HOOAH KEEP UP THE OUTSANDING WORK!!!

1:21 PM, Jan 20, 2006

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