Weblog entry #85 for Steve
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I've been writing less about the code behind the site for a while, so heres a brief recap of what has been going on recently.
Mostly the changes have been to improve the performance, and to tidy up a few ropy areas in the code.
There was one important bugfix: now RSS comment feeds on polls work correctly.
I discovered the Test::Pod Perl module, which allows you to test that your inline documentation written in pod ("plain old documentation") is valid. This means that the auto-generated code documentation is now correct, and adds some more tests to the site test suit.
The site code itself is looking good now, I've finally gotten rid of a couple of files which didn't fit into a nice structure.
The actual installation instructions / code documentation is a bit ugly still - mostly because I'm pretty sure that nobody wants to actually use the code on a site of their own. (Having said that there is documentation, and releases are made regularly.)
I think the biggest visible changes at the moment relate to the site-searches, both article searchs and tag searches. Now these two different search types share a common result format, and both match the look and feel of the main site.
Anyway .. that was a pretty link-intensive entry.
I'll try to record more about what I do behinds the scenes in the future, as that was what this weblog was supposed to be about! In the mean time you can spy upon all the CVS commits I make via the timeline...
If there is anything you'd like to see changed about the layout, features, or way the site works .. feel free to suggest it.
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I like to think I'm a competant developer, although these days I mostly consider myself a "sysadmin who programs" rather than "a programmer who sysadmins".
Most of the best practises I've seen I tend to follow when I'm doing serious work, the obvious things like:
- Making releases, to make sure i'm not missing files.
- Using revision control of some kind.
- Trying to write appropriate documentation.
- Using consistent indentation/formatting. (I dont much care what I use when working on other peoples code - but it all must be the same, and match.)
- Designing interfaces appropriately when working with OO.
- Writing and using test suites/test cases.
- Writing plans of how I'm going to implement things.
- Having seperate production and testing environments.
- Always looking up errors on google before asking other people
Of course for scratch code these things go out of the window .. as you'd expect ;)
I think I could safely say that all the code running here follows those guidelines pretty thoroughly.
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