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February 09, 2004
Molehills to Mountains
Yesterday I started work on the Blog Roundup and my cobbled collection of crud (also known as a perl program) collapsed. I started to add another band-aid and then got impatient with it and began to rewrite bits. Now nothing works.....
I understand what is wrong but every small change has a bigger impact. Maybe this is a reflection on my programming skills but I find this pattern repeating. I start with a really good idea and then write some code. Once it is working the potential expands and I can see more opportunities - more functionality - more potential. That means I start hacking (in the original sense) the code and it grows and grows. The new features make the small starting exercise far more impressive. Other people start suggesting more features that matter to them so they get added and then the camel's straw comes along and the code breaks. Version 2 is a complete rewrite from the ground up with more flexible data storage, more encapsulated routines, maybe a database to store stuff in. This is only possible because of the wider scope that the code now covers. Once again a series of improvements come along. Once again the code grows and then is sort of stable but the pedant in me sees that maybe my model was wrong, maybe there is a better way. After using it for a while I become dissatisfied and so I start on V3. Sometimes V3 is too big a job and the program dies in the transition.
Well technically speaking, top10 is a V2. The first version was a page spider which worked but the code for extracting url's was written by hand. I used it to compare primary and backup sites. Sometime in the near future I will try to use it to fix a friend's MT problem (the data can no longer be extracted from MT but the archive pages exist so I figure the spider can read the pages and construct a backup file). V2 (the current version) worked well (with some cool perl library routines that did the grunt work) but I was trying to extend it and ran into the problem of resolving similar URLs. It reached the point where there were 40 site exceptions in the program which suggests I was doing it the wrong way.
Oh well, I am planning V3. Collect the URLs (as currently done) and feed them through three stages - one to clean up the URL (I don't want article details, just the blog link), two to handle a replacement table (which says "www.blah.com/blog/archive" is really "blah.com/blog") and the third to handle the URL to blog name conversion so that the links look right.
So what? Well it means that the Blog Roundup didn't happen. Maybe next week depending on my coding and concentration. It also means I am somewhat distracted by the coding exercise. My mind still works like a student (wants to pull all-nighters to code) but my body is somewhat aged (needs beauty maintenance sleep).
Oh yes, one of the extensions was to try building FOAF (friend of a friend) lists direct from the link tables.
Posted by Ozguru at February 9, 2004 09:02 PM
Comments
Posted by: TL at February 9, 2004 09:02 PM
Posted by: Cindy at February 9, 2004 09:02 PM
