Don't Leave Broken Windows

September 16, 2003 | View Comments (0) | Programming

I believe I am finished with this phase of the mini-redesign. Cosmetically there are not that many changes that can be seen. The majority of the changes came in the backend. The reason the backend needed to be changed is because when I first started this blog I was in such a hurry to get something public that I didn't think of the infrastructure I wanted. I pretty much stuck with all the MovableType defaults. So all my pages were left as .html. As you can guess this became a pain to update each page when I wanted to change my header or sidebar because I wanted to do a simple include, but was unable too. This was a broken window.

What I wanted was to have every page contain a .php extension so that I could make the pages more dynamic and easier to upgrade. To be honest I didn't really think of all this stuff till I started reading all the articles floating around lately concerning how people were extending MT. I didn't realize what a great system it was and how configurable you could make it. Well now I am beginning to see the true potential behind this application.

The main issue behind changing my archives to php was that people had posted links on their websites to some of my pages and I didn't want their links to become broken. I figured I needed to get this over with and it would be better to have a 100 links broken now than to have thousands broken later. I went through with the restructuring and ran a test to see where the old links would take me. I headed on over to inmyexperience.com where they let me ping their site and clicked on one of my old articles. To my surprise it took me to my site with the old article and everything was functional. Awesome! Since MT had already built the page it simply remained there so none of my old links were broken. Even better when someone posts a comment, the comment gets posted to the new version of the article with the .php extension and therefore the person is brought to the updated site. Awesome!

I guess there are two main points to this entry. 1. MT Rocks! 2. Don't leave broken windows in your code or design. Studies have shown that houses and cars with broken windows are more likely to become vandalized and deteriorate quicker than ones without broken windows. Don't let this happen to your work. Once you come across a broken window, fix it immediately.

Also if you see something wrong with this site please feel free to drop me a line. I get messages all the time from people telling me stuff that is wrong and I try to fix it immediately. Thanks.

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Don't Leave Broken Windows

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