Posts from October 19, 2001

Hmm...I have one...two...three...four dynamically generated websites that I have developed. From a technology perspective, they could be looked at as major and minor updates to the same codebase. Unfortunately there is little compatibility between them. I can do things in one that I can't easily do in another, or at all. I have one site that gets many more visitors, but it has the last verison of the codebase...the newsest version doesn't get any traffic, which is ok, but I want its code.

I am building a web site/content management framework, but in the meantime, I have these other systems to support. What to do, what to do? I know what to do...finish the framework and the use it in every site I have. Easier said than done. I need to add features and functionality now, not in a month or two.

The sites...

• daneman.org - version 1.0 of the codebase.
• metastash.com - version 2.0 of the codebase, and a great improvement.
• cachedcode.com - version 2.5 of the codebase...better design, but no functionality (dev time still goes to v 2.0)
• dev.chapter41.com - version 3.0 of the codebase...revolutionary...but still under development.

Another gem of bias by the media.

It seems as though a ZDNet writer received some information about an error message that a reader ran into on a Microsoft site and decided to write an article about it. The article, titled "Microsoft.com error reveals IDs, passwords", unfairly attempts to shoot down Microsoft and the .NET technologies. It takes a friend of the author to save the article by pointing out that this error has nothing to do with problems inherent to .NET, it has to do with a programmer putting code into production that should not have been.

The code was left in debug mode which exposes lots of nice details to developers when errors occur, details that should never be seen by the general public. Aside from the debug mode issue, the error was caused by a variable not being declared. Why didn't this pop up in testing? The error prone code should never have made it into production. Perhaps I should apply for that job with Microsoft that was recently posted on one of the many job boards.