November 28, 2005

Travel, Turkey, and Technology

Turkey Day, 2005, has come and gone, and in the grand tradition of incorrigible nerdiness, I spent most of it sitting at home and working on Rohit's Realm. Now, most of you are probably wondering what I was doing wasting time on a computer or writing letters to my children, when I should have been investing effort into my romantic quest, but since I've been living out of a suitcase for the past three weeks, including as I write this now, it's been somewhat difficult to meet the love of my life. Don't worry - I'll get back on it as soon as I return to San Francisco. Until then, bear with me.

As you most of you have probably realized, Rohit's Realm is pretty much falling apart. To name just a few ostensible problems:

• All the static content is hopelessly out of date. The About section is from Oct. 2003, the Webcam has a picture from May 2004, and the Schedule still has my duty schedule from when I was a Resident Assistant two years ago.
• The Server-Side Includes (SSI) code for cached monthly archives is horribly broken - instead of showing the current number of comments for an entry, it accurately queries the database for the first entry on the page and lists this number for all other entries. Update: As I wrote this, I realized it was probably a mod_perl problem, which it was, and fixed it.
• At one point, there used to be categories for entries, but these have disappeared!
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliance is a lie, because the code for adding comments doesn't escape ampersands.
• Until last weekend, the RSS feed didn't list a publication date for entries, inaccurately listed times in GMT, and the listed copyright was Copyright 2003, Rohit Nafday.
• The Gallery just got updated to G2, changed it's URL (it's now rohitsrealm.com/gallery2/), broke the RSS feed, and won't let anonymous users view anything but shit-ass thumbnails.

You can't see the rest of the problems, but believe me - they are worse on the backend. There is obviously an explanation for all this, but to make a long story short, it amounts to the following - I was lazy, I am a jackass, I didn't use CVS often enough, and I mucked with code in production and then didn't finish what I started. However, all hope is not lost.

I wrote out a roadmap last year, and several points have now been accomplished. All relevant static content now resides on rohitnafday.net and I regularly update that site. My server has been rebuilt, with a RAID-1 array and all the latest software, and it is now in a colocation facility in San Francisco. Here's what you can expect in the next few weeks:

• Over Thanksgiving, I wrote a web-based RSS news aggregator - I'm putting the finishing touches on the UI right now, and it should be done in the coming week.
• My gallery is no longer going to be public - to view pictures, you will have to create a username / password and login henceforth (more on why later). I have been working on a basic identity management solution since July 2005, and plan to wrap up work this week.
• I am going to slightly re-factor the blog engine I wrote in Spring 2005 and convert my blog to use it by mid-December.
• Complete visual redesign of rohitsrealm.com should be forthcoming before the New Year, with any luck.

As you can see, I've bitten off quite a lot, as usual. However, my annoyance with the existing setup has grown to the point where I can no longer tolerate it. And don't you worry - between programming and my job, I still intend to find my true love (a.k.a. ruin my life); it remains my #1 priority for December!