The Writer's DB Blog » Web development

Administrative Notice: Server move

Charles — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:36:18 +0000

This is just a quick notice that as of last night (October 30), the WritersDB site has moved to a new server at a new hosting provider. You shouldn’t notice any changes—so if you do notice anything out of the ordinary, please let me know.

As always, write well!

It’s the designer’s fault.

Charles — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:29:52 +0000

For what it’s worth, an opinion on good web development.

If a user encounters a problem while using your site—for example, they can’t find the control or the content they’re looking for—assume it’s the designer’s fault. Especially if you’re the designer.

See the comments on my previous post: “nevermind. I found the widget key. I can’t believe it, it was right in front of my face.”

It is the designer’s job to say, “That was my fault.” In this case, there was nothing but text to call attention to the widget key. Now there’s an icon:

It’s better for the designer’s ego to blame the user. But the designer’s ego is rarely the point.

Behind the scenes updates

Charles — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:32:03 +0000

For the last few weeks, as time permits, I’ve been making substantial revisions to the backend code for the Writer’s Database. That, and testing just about every action it’s possible to perform on the site, to make sure the new code didn’t break anything. As of tonight, everything I’ve tested is finally in working order, so it appears safe to launch the revised code.

You shouldn’t notice any major differences. If you do, please let me know, if by “difference” we mean something that needs fixing.

Easily anticipated Q: Charles, why are you spending time on changes that we end users aren’t even supposed to notice?

A: A very reasonable question. These “invisible” changes to the infrastructure make it possible to introduce new features that you will notice, down the line. As always, stay tuned.

Cosmetic update

Charles — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:18:36 +0000

Okay, I admit it. Today’s update is almost entirely cosmetic. Yes, the front page will now display personalized content if you’re logged in, which is nice. But mostly this update was about making that page more enticing for casual surfers who haven’t already discovered the depth of features under the hood.

We’re writers, yes, and words are our milieu . . . but the pretty pictures can still help to deliver a message. So now, we have some.

The meatier updates—the API, widget updates, RSS feeds, offline capability, and (of course) some others I won’t talk about until they’re done—are still in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

The widgetation continues

Charles — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:23:50 +0000

Thanks to the fine folks at Netvibes, I’ve been spared some programming effort. One of the items on the to-do list has been to create a Konfabulator widget (a.k.a. Yahoo! Widget) for those of you who aren’t using Dashboard, iGoogle, or Netvibes, but still want your WritersDB data “to go.”

What Netvibes has done, which is pretty spectacular, is to make good on their promise of a “Universal” widget architecture. It used to be that if you wanted to create widgets for Dashboard, iGoogle, Konfabulator/Yahoo, Windows Vista, Windows Live, etc., you would have to manually port the relevant code to each of those platforms, coding to match the idiosyncracies of each.

Widgets written for the Netvibes platform, though, can now be run in several of those other environments. The conversion to all those different formats is handled with no additional effort from the developer.

So, if you were waiting on those proverbial tenterhooks for the Yahoo/Konfabulator widget, you can now get it here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/202565/writersdb-pending-subs
(Just click the “Yahoo” link on that page.)

Old is the new new.

Charles — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 04:04:48 +0000

When I rebuilt the Writer’s Database, I tried to make sure I wasn’t losing any existing features while adding the new ones. But sometimes, it takes a fresh pair of eyes to make sure you’ve caught everything.

One of my favorite users* pointed out yesterday that it was no longer possible to sort the list of submissions by your choice of title, market, or date submitted. Oops!

I’ve restored that capability as of tonight. Just click on any of the first three column headers. Thanks, K!

——
* What do you mean, I’m not supposed to have favorites? Some of you contribute lots of good ideas!

Ghosts of coding past

Charles — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:08:35 +0000

Been working on the one-time upgrade script that will convert all the existing database content from version 1.0 of the site to work with version 2.0. It would have worked with no problems . . . except for one, er, problem.

There was a flaw in version 1.0, related to handling of quotation marks in the names of manuscripts and markets. You could put quotes into the names of either, but when you submitted one of those manuscripts, or submitted to one of those markets, the record of the submission would fail to record the full name of that submission or market. It would only record up to the quotation mark.

This is an easy thing to fix, but I only became aware of it just now. None of my own stories or markets have quote marks in their names, and none of the site’s other users ever complained about it.

So, there are a whole bunch of records where the submission data doesn’t quite match up to the market and manuscript data. I think the best-if-not-only solution may be to correct each of these records manually.

The lesson: always code things correctly from the beginning. Cleaning up after yourself later takes longer.

I knew that already. But knowing it and always managing to write 100% bug-free code are two different things.