Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   not even a technological brainstem
Thursday, September 16 2010
Today, with David's (of Penny and David) permission, I finally released the redesign for David's content syndication site, which I'd recently migrated from Cold Fusion and Microsoft SQL to PHP/MySQL. This was actually the first ever complete migration of a site from one technology to another that I'd ever undertaken single-handedly (or, for that matter, as part of a company). People talk about doing it (or more accurately, the desire to do it), but it almost never happens. Usually it's done piecemeal and never completed. For example, when I worked at CollegeClub.com in San Diego and also for Launch.com in Santa Monica, the sites were always in the process of being migrated from one technology to the other, but there was never the resources to make a complete job of it. Sometimes three fundamentally different technologies would have to coexist because traces of the original technology still remained, much like a technological brainstem.
I'd already made a partial migration of David's site and for months there had been hacked-together code in place to replicate data in both directions between the Microsoft and MySQL databases. But that system had been brittle and it seemed best to do a complete break with the past.
It's a testament to the thoroughness of my work that there were relatively few glitches after today's release. One woman had trouble logging in, but even with perfect login systems there is a 20% failure rate from people who either don't know their logins or don't understand how the web works (yes, passwords are supposed to be case sensitive). To make the transition as painless as possible, I'd made it so everyone without administrative logins automatically had their old Cold-Fusion-set-cookies replaced with functioning new cookies for the new regime.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100916

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