New Blog (Engine) Soon

As some folks may know, the engine on which this blog runs was written by myself. However, the code was not the prettiest thing ever to grace the tubes. I wrote it in a nice, RESTful manner, but as I noticed that I was repeating a large amount of code, I tried to abstract it out into various separate methods. The result ended up being rather messy. But then I moved on to other projects and left the engine as “good enough.”

A little over a month or ago, though, I decided it was high time to revise it. I’m very fond of the idea of revising code. In the best English course I ever took, we talked about the idea of “revision.” The professor explained that revision was literally the process of seeing your text again: “re,” meaning again, and “visio,” the same root from which comes “vision.” After just getting all your ideas down on paper, you take a step back and read them from the perspective not of the author, who by definition already understands everything that’s going on, but of a reader. This allows you to see weaknesses and potential strengths in a way that was impossible before.

The same principle applies to code. Once it’s written, it’s quite effective to take a step back and adjust your perspective. So I did for my blog; I essentially dumped all my REST-abstracting code in favor of make_resourceful, added a bunch of specs, and generally made the code cleaner, smaller, and more readable.

I’m not quite done yet; I still have specs for the views and helpers to write. Once those are finished, I’ll upload the new engine and all will be well. For the first revision, there’ll only be a few outward changes. The logo on the top will be changed to an image so it works properly in all browsers, and the signin character in the upper-right corner will be changed. After I finish this, though, I’ll begin adding lots of new features that should be lots of fun in the future.