WebCoder

1Scripts 3: The Inside Scoop

I know that this version of the site has been out a while, but I feel like posting about it.

The Idea

In early spring 2008 I was going to make a site where people could submit tutorials. Sounds pretty basic, but this one was different. The tutorials on the front page were chosen by the users, like a Digg for tutorials. I finished the viewing part, so you could view tutorials and comments, and sort by tags and categories. The sorting code was not done yet.

Months went by, and I was never motivated to finish it. In late July I found a partially finished design for 1Scripts I had made a while ago. I finished the design, and integrated it with TinyCMS (the last version of 1Scripts ran on this script, as did the tutorial script). While changing the script to work with the new design I noticed a bug in the CMS. A really bad bug. I tried to fix it, and downloaded the newest version from my site to make sure I didn’t have an old buggy version. Didn’t work. I realized that the bug had been created in an update, since 1Scripts, which ran a modified old version of the CMS, did not have the bug. I ported all the code of the script to run without the CMS, and finished coding the rest of the script. And on July 23, 2008 A.D., I uploaded the script to my website. It worked!

Now there were just a few minor things to finish up. I added all the codes and tutorials, fixing some bugs while the site was on the server. Then there was the issue of the site news (blog). The old blog was a TinyCMS module. Since the new site did not run TinyCMS, I had to make a lot of changes to get it to work. I downloaded the old blog data file to my computer and uploaded it to the new site. I got hit with the “serialized data files don’t transfer well from Linux to Windows bug,” which had affected 1Scripts when it was only 2 months old. I thought it only happened if you edited the file on another OS, but apparently just downloading it was enough. I was forced to replace it with a blank data file.

Technical Details

Time Spent: 2-3 days finishing the code, converting it, and modifying the design, more time making the design and beginning the code (months earlier)

Programming Language: PHP (…)

Data storage method: serialized arrays for the data, phpBB for the login system (nitsua’s idea)

Visitors: 50-150 per day, 25-50 for this blog

Page Rank: 2 for the main site, view more