Inside Technique : Fixing the Backend
By Scott Isaacs

This kicks off a series of articles that discuss the rebuilding of Inside Dynamic HTML's back-end.

Over the past few weeks we have been quietly rebuilding the ASP scripts that run this site. The only current (hopefully) visual evidence are subtle changes to the Inside Techniques layout. Barring any technical issues, the remaining changes should go on-line within two weeks.

Rebuilding the backend has been an often postponed and dreaded task. While Inside Dynamic HTML runs smoothly on the surface, I made hasty decisions on the design of the backend which have turned it into an unmanageable mess of code.

I have learned the often stated and sometimes not followed goal that designing a web-site for the long-run requires giving your server design and architecture a long-hard look. Otherwise, site maintainance and the never-ending need to tweak and modify the user interface can take over the ability to generate new content. In the case of Inside DHTML, we took lots of shortcuts on the server that we thought allowed us to deliver new content quickly.

So, next I tell you about my big design mistake.

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