Site Redevelopment, part 2

More random notes as I continue to redevelop my personal web site, www.genghishack.com.

I’ve been organizing things in the background. I do a little bit more of this every day. Part of getting any large task done is just plugging away at it bit by bit, day by day, even if it shows no visible progress to the outside world.

One thing I needed to fix was the resume link – I wanted to put a new version of my resume up there, and I’m glad I did, because yesterday’s reshuffling of the files caused that link to break. Good thing I don’t have the URL for this site widely circulated yet.

I’ve had this hosting account for a few years, and it shows the signs of use. it’s an SSH account hosted on a linux server, which is good. SSH accounts are good. Don’t even get me started on how bad it is to have FTP-only access to a site that you’re trying to manage. People who think that’s good enough for a professional web developer simply don’t know what they’re doing. For one thing, it lets me run CVS. If you don’t know what CVS is, or if you’ve never used any form of revision control – if you aren’t even sure what the term means – stop now, waste no more time as a web developer, and hie thee off to the nearest bookstore to pick up a copy of Open Source Development with CVS. If you don’t want to spend the buckage, you can read it on the web. You want version control. Even if you’re working on projects all by yourself and not in conjunction with a group of other developers, you want to be able to go back to a previous version of your code when you’ve totally screwed things up, tag your code at various points, maintain separate branches of your code for separate projects, etc. Enough about CVS. Either you know it, or you don’t. CVS is one of those demarcation points in a developer’s career – Suffice to say I’m not much interested in working with anyone on a development project who hasn’t ever used some form of version control.

Back to subject. A clean workspace reflects a clean mind. The same goes for your desk as for your filesystem. If you’ve got stuff lying around everywhere in random locations, it’s going to be awfully hard to concentrate on what’s important. I don’t like to miss details. I like to know where all my information is. Organization is foundation-work for everything that comes after it. Another large part of getting any large task done is just putting everything where it goes.

My home directory is now organized into sites (I have several domains and subdomains pointing at this location), documents, logs, source files, my cvsroot, .ini files, the cgi-bin (required on this web server) and the temp directory. The sites folder contains the root directories for each of my web sites, whether presently operating, in progress, or defunct. The defunct ones I’ll need to clean up at some point, removing code that I want to re-use and deleting the rest, but for right now, they are where they belong. Easy to find and ready to be picked over when I have the time.

My personal site’s root directory needed to be cleaned up a lot, too. It contained artifacts of several old projects and lots of little one-off experiments that I stored there when I was not really paying much attention to how it looked (for a long time, this site was a one-page deal with nothing more than a title and a link to my resumé). The current directory structure of my site reflects much of my thinking about how to partition assets and tasks within the framework of a site. There’s an admin section, a world unto itself; a content directory, because presentation MUST be separated from processing; the always-present directories for css files, JavaScript, images and flash; an includes directory for stuff that must be included by all scripts; a directory to use when uploading files; a directory for libraries (classes, sets of functions and such) that may be loaded and used by some particular script; directories for each of the sections of the site, because I’d much rather have the url read http://mysite/directory/ than http://mysite/page.php; and the index and configuration files for the site. This makes sense to me. Again, I know where everything is. And since my idea of where things should go sometimes changes, I’ve written my code so that I can move a directory where I want it to go and change its location in the config file, and the entire site will know where to access that resource without a hiccup.

This foundational stuff may seem very basic, but it’s important to get the basics right. Once you’ve done that, you can take off from there and do all sorts of cool things. It’s like learning to read or write: the alphabet, the basic set of building blocks, is the hardest thing to learn and get right. It takes a while. You have to memorize all these weird shapes and sounds from nothing, and the order in which they go, and then how they relate to each other, and how to spell words from them, and then how to put the words into sentences – but once you’ve got those basics, you can take off from there into all sorts of worlds. It’s important to get that initial learning right. Get the foundations put solidly in place. If you don’t, you’ll have all kinds of problems later on trying to learn and use more advanced concepts.

So. This is what it is, trying to get all this foundational and framework stuff right. Putting all your tools in the right place. Making sure you have control. Anticipating what kinds of problems you’re going to face. Designing for them from the get-go.