Inside Technique : Fixing the Backend : The Mistakes

I am going to focus on my largest mistake and what caused the redesign of the architecture. A while back I realized I miscoded every page to check for the 4.0 browsers explicitly. This means that when the 5.0 browsers are released, they will be treated to the pre-4.0 This highlighted our first mistake, which was actually not so much the coding error, but the fact that every page contained all its own logic.

So, as we quickly grow into the hundreds of pages, this error was repeated over and over again in each page. Fixing it requires visiting every page on the web-site, a very time-consuming, boring, and possibly error-prone process. In addition, the same issue appears every time I tweaked the site's general layout, I have to modify each and every page. Even though a linked style sheet is used for IE4, sometimes the structure of a common page component (eg., the page header) or the down-level representation needs to be changed.

I knew about this architectural problem early on but never sat down to fix it. Rather, the focus was to generate cool and new content, and less on the long-term maintainence of the site. However, as always, the maintainence issues started limiting the growth of the site, especially when it came to adding a search engine.

In some cases we have two completely separate self-contained pages for the same information. The page you see is determined by the browser you are using. This means that in some cases the same content is duplicated in two places. This means the occasional spelling error, broken link, and so-on needs to be fixed in two places. All links need to be managed very carefully to ensure the user is sent to the correct page. The worst part is this reeked havoc with the soon to be released search engine for the site. Your queries may return references to two pages that are actually the same. Choose the wrong page and you may or may not get what you expected (much of our error routing sent you back to our home page).

So, fixing this problem is actually pretty easy with enough time and effort.

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