Wherein I silently wonder if having Ran around would make for faster coding

Hey guys, hope you’re well. Though I’d give you a quick rundown on what I’ve been up to and some of the changes made to the site since the last post.  

If I’ve been doing my job correctly, you mostly wouldn’t have noticed the changes I’ve been making lately. A lot of work has been put under the hood and deals with cleaning up legacy code and bringing up stuff to a newer standard. I know, I know, I’ve done that before but it’s an ongoing process and it’ll still be a while yet before everything is up to snuff. More specifically, I’ve abandoned the old XHTML standard (which was over a decade old anyhow) and have moved most of the user-facing code to plain ol’ HTML5.  

I’m not really going to go into the differences in standards but suffice it to say that there’s a lot more interesting things that can be done with modern code as compared to the relatively strict XHTML the site was designed around. Also this has given me an excuse to look at old code do more than just upgrade it—I’ve been taking notes and incorporating new practices into other code wherever I can. Things like further adding to the user scripts that I overhauled a little while ago should be a little easier, at the very least. Like I said earlier, this is something ongoing and while a lot of the site now validates as proper HTML5 there’s still plenty of pages (most of them not user-facing) that require a lot of tinkering and rewriting to get up to snuff.  

While dealing with old code has taken most of my time, I’ve also taken the time to do something beyond refactoring. There’s two new options that can now be toggled in the settings menu and I think that one of them in particular will be useful to writers who can’t tell just how long their posts are before hitting submit. Other than that, there’s also a minor secret feature that’s made it in to the live version of the site that should liven up posts. I’m not going to share any details on that yet because, while I’m sure it’s feature complete and bug-free, some of the other things I’m working on may break that portion of the code if I’m not careful. Would rather make sure that everything else is done first before telling the users how to use it and potentially get “y u brake thing’ type complaints when updates come around.  

Speaking of bugs, I also squashed a few open issues that had been on my list for a while. It’s the kind of thing that I think only I noticed but it’s always good to have issues taken care of. There’s a lot of bigger bugs I have to sort of looming ahead but, thankfully, most of that doesn’t affect the actual board pages and instead the administrative bits. So only I have to really deal with the frustration of breakage

So, what’s coming up? In the shortish term, I plan to continue cleaning up the board pages, making sure that every part of the site comes out as valid HTML5. There’s a whole very complicated chunk of code that needs to be reworked for that to be done (related to how data is outputted via templates and a class under specific circumstances) and I foresee a lot of late night when dealing with that. I’ll also see about fixing some of those management bugs finally as well as move the private bits of the site towards stricter CSP and pure HTML. I may also rework some of the scripts to take advantage of the new uncluttered HTML but that’s admittedly low priority.  

There’s a new, quite useful, feature that I started working on a month or so ago that I think I previously alluded to. That’s partly on the back burner as it’d also benefit from cleaner surrounding code but I’ll definitely be working on it in the coming days and weeks. Once that’s done I expect I’ll put up one of these tech posts talking about its scope and challenges.  

On the slightly longer term, I’m also thinking of changing the site’s template engine to something different. ADwoo takes stored data and uses PHP to output the pages that we all know and love. The problem is that it’s always been a little finicky to manage, its documentation is utterly shit and development on it is uneven. It’s recently become unmaintaned (yet again) and so that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Changing to something different like Twig or Blade (or even Smarty) is likely to be a very complicated undertaking which will require a lot of time, reading and patience but it’s really the only way forward if I want to keep what passes for the rest of my sanity.  

Beyond and during all that, I’ll still be thinking about all the other features and changes I’ve wanted to make. Rest assured that the Storylist, archiving, update/story tracking and all that haven’t been forgotten. I just don’t want to work on all of that before the foundations are properly laid. Every single thing I do usually goes through thorough testing and often several iterations before I’m satisfied that it’s good enough. The amount of money the Patreon makes goes a long way in helping me allocate the time to do it (and occasionally tap others to help out) but it’s still a labor of love from me as it’s certainly not enough to cover the actual man hours of work.

I’ve been thinking of making a poll to see what (small) features you’d like me to work on sometime soon. But even if I don’t, I’m always interesting in hearing what you guys think and have to say about my efforts and the site. Let me know in the comments, IRC or elsewhere if you ever feel like you have something to say.