Chris Wiegman

Archive for January, 2009

So what’s with the Google search results? It looks as if a filtering database might be down as every site shows “This site may harm your computer.” Anyone seen anything on this?

I’ve been developing web pages and sites since about 1995. In that time I’ve become very set in my ways and have developed methodologies and a work flow strategy that has served me almost too well for a long time now. These methods and techniques have developed based primarily on a couple of “truths” I’ve always had present in nearly every project I’ve ever worked on. First of all, I’ve always worked alone and therefore haven’t had to worry about conflicts or other problems that can slow things down in a team environment (this is actually kind of an rarity for me as it seems as if everything else I’ve done in my professional life has involved a team or group of one sort or another). Second, I’ve always worked on sites in which the owners or clients really don’t have any idea what they are looking for. Consequently I’ve had pretty much unlimited freedom to experiment with features, design, and all the other aspects that make a modern site. In some cases even decisions like the company logo were something I had to come up with on the fly for the website. Finally, I’ve rarely had to worry about disabling an existing page or site allowing me to work directly on the production server for any given project. Basically, I was living in sort of a developers utopia where I had no one to really answer to and a budget and the time to try out pretty much anything I want. Heck, I learned PHP by redesigning the main site I’m in charge of on a whim converting it from the ASP base that had served me well for about 5 years.

Today my utopia has come to an end. I now find myself in the position where I need to once again redesign the site for my full-time employer while working within the constraints of both a team and the in-ability to design directly on the production server. What’s even a bigger change for me is that I also need to really re-work the content and presentation to fit in a rough set of guidelines given to me by the department (OK, you can put away your little violins now).

Frankly I’m looking forward to the challenge, but as of today I haven’t figured out how I’m going to accomplish it all yet. Some of the bigger points are as follows:

1. Migrate the existing structure from the Windows server I’ve always used to a Linux server. The need for mod-rewrite and the cost of Windows are the main motivations here. With another new version of Windows server out and still no real easy way to integrate a mod-rewrite functionality I just can’t justify staying with MS any longer. I’ve been using the LAMP environment on hosted servers for the last few years, but I’ve never set it up before.
2. I now have at least one developer to work with and I need to make darn sure were not duplicating work or writing code that won’t play well together.
3. I really need to clean up the code on the current site. Almost nothing is re-used anywhere.
4. I need to maintain the data in the current website database. This shouldn’t be too hard and in fact I should be able to do it with a simple migration script, but it is a constraint all the same.
5. After years of adding “experimental” features I really need to re-organize the content and organization of the whole site removing unused features and pages and optimizing those that will remain.

All in all it will be an interesting challenge and one I am really looking forward too, however I’m sure it will lead to a heavy loss of whatever hair I have left!

So I’ve been working on my own CMS (The Bridge CMS) for about 8 years now and I have been very happy with it. The problem however lies in the fact that so much code is reused so many times that it makes it very difficult to update or change a whole lot. With the new semester starting tomorrow it is time to start rewriting Bridge to achieve a few goals:

1.) I want to make Bridge easier for users to get in, change what they need, and get out with the minimum amount of effort. Although the last version of the software made great strides towards this goal, there is still, as always, room for improvement.

2.) I want to streamline the code base to help reduce bugs and to make future updates easier. Right now simple changes simply take too long and leave to much open for error. The next generation of the Bridge software will work do reduce this with a more powerful internal code library and other streamlining features.