Bringing Old Projects Back to Life
Remember this post from quite a while back? “Something Few People Have Ever Seen”
Of course you don’t because each time I’ve mentioned it since, I get met with virtual blank stares. And, by “virtual blank stares” I mean, of course, a complete lack of comments. Anyway, your comments on that post were on this post.
As you may recall, I spent a good part of last year working on my eBook.
At some point after that, I started work on relaunching another one of my websites. I did a partial relaunch of the site at the beginning of last month. But, I am still continuing work on some of the features.
What I did is started to recycle some of my coding from the first post referenced above. As you may recall, that was a forum system, so I decided to borrow some of that code in order to create a better commenting system on the relaunched site. I tried opening it to comments a few years back, but it quickly became so full of spam I just tossed the whole comment system. Now, however, I will have a better commenting system that will require users to actually join as members of the site before they can leave a comment. Registrations will be manually done, so that should weed out a lot of spammers. Plus, I plan to have some other spam-thwarting mechanisms in place.
At any rate, I have been thinking of this new commenting schema as a “lite” version of that forum system I had started to build so long ago.
In the meantime, however, I started a new website in a completely different area, using some open source software. Well, that site died a painful death after a couple weeks. Somehow, it is completely messed up. There is a directory where you put any plugins for the system. Well, last week I think it was, the thing went down after I was modifying the theme. The end result is that, somehow, putting anything in the plugins directory results in the site not working at all. And, without plugins, the system is largely useless because the majority of the functionality you want is in the plugins.
So, I re-uploaded files, replacing basically everything on there, all to no avail. The conclusion I reached is that I would have to wipe the whole thing out and start anew. Which would be doable, except that it leaves me wondering how long before the new install would be toast, you know? It’s not like I was messing with the database when the thing went down. I was modifying CSS and changing some administrative settings. My feeling is that if the software is that flaky, I cannot rely on it for anything.
So, then I got to thinking, why don’t I just use my own stuff? Finish it up and use it instead of relying on someone else’s “solution”? Plus, I can code into it the features that I want and, since I am already (mostly) familiar with the code, it’s easier for me to modify my own stuff than meddle around with open source software and try to figure it out.
And that is what I have been working on. Plus, I’ve been adding features that I didn’t have way back when in order to bring it more into the modern age. On top of that, I’ve got some level of flexibility in the presentation of certain things so that you, as a user, will be better able to view things the way you want to view them. The version I am working on will have that only in a few key areas, but I may expand upon that in the future.
Right now, the focus is on finishing the basic functionality so that the “lite” version can be released on the site I’ve mentioned for use as a commenting solution. After that, I have two new sites in mind that would use a more full-featured version.
Anyway, I’ve got a couple things to do yet before calling it a day, so I better get to them.
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