Interesting Links for 14-08-2015

[andrewducker]

• Jeremy Corbyn replies to Blair warning: I don't do personal, I don't do abuse
  • (tags: politics Labour )
• Livejournal PSA: How to switch between /friends page and /feed page
  • (tags: LiveJournal )
• Neil Gaiman on His Return to Miracleman (22 years later!)
  • (tags: Miracleman NeilGaiman )
• How have things changed, 100 days into a Conservative government?
  • (tags

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

LJ has an admin console? WTF?

[gonzo21]

I know right? That was my response.

[momentsmusicaux]

So much of LJ's code is antiquated still. I remember seeing an announcement on Dreamwidth a year or so ago where they said they'd added error messages to a particular form. And I thought, what do you mean -- you're not using some sort of HTML form framework that does validation errors for you OOTB? And they're probably not -- every form is probably its own totally separate chunk of code.

[gonzo21]

I think so, yes. And they compounded their problems when they sacked all the legacy code people in American and relocated operations to Russia, where none of the coders had any familiarity at all with the basketcase of coding that is LJ.

[andrewducker]

Yup, it's a bunch of Perl scripts generating HTML on the fly, and then templating it with their own templating languages (two of them, as they shifted from S1 to S2 in 1999, but still support S1.

And yeah, there wasn't anything decent back then, so they wrote their own, and rewriting it to the HTML form framework du jour would be a titanic job.

[momentsmusicaux]

You'd think after a few forms they've have come up with their own base classes / helper functions / whatever to handle common stuff like validation.

[momentsmusicaux]

You say titanic, I say fun!

[andrewducker]

Well, next time you have a couple of free hours...

[momentsmusicaux]

Probably more fun if paid ;)

Plus you'd need good test coverage of the code first, so you can refactor without breaking things.

[andrewducker]

You'd better get that done first :-)

(Obviously, you'd be working on DW, as LJ's source is closed)

[momentsmusicaux]

Yup, soon as they hire me. I'll put my feet up while I wait for the call :p

[andrewducker]

But you could be seeing your name in lights!

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/176263.html

[fiddlingfrog]

I noticed that sometime in the last nine months or so LJ finally got rid of the ability to switch back to S1 styles. Between that and this incident I'm kind of hoping they finally put their foot down and stop supporting S1.