November 22, 2010

Slowly, But Surely

A couple months back, I penned an incredibly dense, technical, and abusive post about my travails with writing a compiler, which, I hope, most of you promptly ignored. The obscurity of that subject matter notwithstanding, however, there was a takeaway there for even the most hapless of the loathsome unwashed among my (nonexistent) readership, namely: I have finally returned to coding. And it's about time, too: things around here have totally been falling apart since I went merrily off to law school some three years back.

Of the two sites that compose my web presence—the Realm and rohitnafday.net, that is—by far, the Realm is in a worse state of disrepair. The design is old and dated, the backend engine half-baked and buggy, and the maintenance virtually nonexistent. The last major redesign was almost four years ago, and the guts of the site have basically gone untouched since then. (Some years I remember to flip the copyright date in the footer, but that's by no means guaranteed.)

Fixing the Realm, though, is no trivial task. The code that runs this site was mostly written some time in the middle of the past decade and in a language that has been losing market share in the web app world for years—Perl, my first love. As a consequence, any attempt on my part to upgrade this site that did not seriously consider porting it to a modern framework (most likely, Ruby on Rails) would be spectacularly shortsighted. And any such conversion attempt would likely take months of work, especially considering my schedule these days.

So what to do with all this new found energy to code again? Simple: I upgraded the other site. (Or as I would have said back in the day, I went after the low-hanging fruit. God, I really hate myself for having just written that.) And while the changes are by no means revolutionary, they do address some nontrivial problems with the old site, most notably by adding an elastic design that should degrade gracefully on smaller screens. Beyond design, I updated all the content on the site and added a colophon and a software section (in case I ever finish that damn compiler I was writing in September!).

I pushed the new version out to the production server last night, and it is now live. Hopefully the ease with which I was able to make this upgrade bodes well for the much larger difficulties that await the rejuvenation of this (most worthless) of sites. But like most things in this miserable charade known as my life, I wouldn't count on it.