Jan
15
2008
at 2:40pm
Do you ever have the task of fixing someone else’s code? Someone else’s crappy code? Don’t you wish you could just start over?
You just need to make a few small changes. But the CSS is such a mess! It would be so much better if you could just re-write it. Cut down on the crud and make it all nice and clean and elegeant. Take it all down like Mike Holmes.
But there’s not enough time for that. The changes are due by tomorrow so you have to just make do with what’s there and add in your own necessarily crappy code.
Sigh… this happens to me all the time these days. And I’m sitting here thinking, should I just fix it? How long would it take? There’s a little brick wall here — do I just climb over or do I start again?
Granted, this code isn’t *that* bad. It’s relatively standards-ey (circa 2004-ish). Just lots of layers of disorganized CSS a bunch of IE5 hacks. It still bugs me though.
Posted in General, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Jan
13
2008
at 12:50pm
Finally, after many months of planning we’ve converted The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal! Liam wrote a good explaination of why we made this choice in his article, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. In short, we felt that vBulletin was too cluttered, too difficult to work with, and was hurting our search rankings.
We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.
The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.
As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.
If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.
(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks 
Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).
Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.
Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »
