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gratuitous geekery. read at own risk.
by lizard at 12:53 AM on September 24, 2003
it has been a fairly grim last few days. by this afternoon, i was your average moderately psychotic geek with her finger on the button, suddenly deciding to upgrade the software that runs this and oh, about a hundred other sites, in the middle of the afternoon, with some new features thrown in for kicks. the satisfaction of accomplishing this with zero downtime wore off quick, and i settled back into space bitch mode (in which i make little if any sense and what do you mean what? *snarl*).
but tonight i drove home with this grin on my face, this irrepressible expression of delightful surprise, and the reason for this goofy mood ... please bear with me, i hope to have a point ... the reason was ... my server logs.
what? server logs? what manner of shallow meaningless geek nonsense is this? trust me, it isn't that at all. first of all, we're talking about my lyricbase. this is the first thing i built from scratch, and it's full of music, which is important. and by important i mean music has saved my life more than once. and i obsessed over this code, hell i dreamt a good bit of it, i have this deep weird geek thing going on with the lyricbase, i really do. and i just discovered that it really, really works. i have regular stats, which track visitors, but not how those visitors use the mostly dynamic pages. so tonight, i discovered several things. i learned that people use the hell out of my useful and practical navigation features, for instance, a fact which is ... nice, but it's not what made me this squeaky.
you see, there is this fairly silly bit of code i thought hardly anyone would see, however i did obsess over it for a day or more, so it would be just ... perfect. my autofiller. the autofiller kicks in if someone decides to disobey the search instructions (type here. click this.) by not typing. it's just a toy. but it's a toy that people play with. a lot of people. and once they start, they keep playing until -- well, you either go see the hamsters, or you are confronted with the salami. now, this site only gets 100, 150 visitors a day, so it is nothing short of amazing that in 23 days, 500 people played the whole game. some of them even argued with it. they argued with my code. i made code that people argue with! *ahem* i'm sorry. i had to tell someone.
813: again=1&submit=click+this
561: again=2
528: again=3
524: again=4
512: again=5
500: again=6 (this heads off to hamtaro, unless you decide to try and play the autofiller a little different way, which is when the salami comes out)
181: search=who+wants+to+play+hide+the+salami
this is one of the first things i ever programmed from the idea on up, a simple thing really, but ... people are playing with my toy! they really are!
sigh, i know, i know, i'm just a weirdo loner geek freak, it's ok, i am mostly harmless.
i'm still grinning like an idiot though.
comments (9)
I'm the first to admit that I know nothing of code and website innards so excuse my stupidity in asking how you might be able to upgrade the software on this and hundreds of other sites. That is freaking amazing.
by anna at September 24, 2003 6:52 AM
it's actually really easy once you do it a few times and crash the machine and knock a hundred rabid bloggers offline while you google around in a cold sweat panic trying to fix whatever you just broke. then you get to where you can just do it, and it just works, well, most of the time. you never know for sure what's going to happen. usually i test it on my work server first (i sysadmin two of these beasts), business clients are sooo much saner than bloggers. hell, they hardly even notice anything happened. bloggers notice. oh boy do they ever.
like everything else, i learned it by thinking, rather arrogantly,"i can figure anything out". it's how i learn stuff - open mouth, insert foot, then frantically work to remove foot before suffocation sets in.
by lizard at September 24, 2003 7:06 AM
I too am a computer illiterate moron. In my industry we have programmers that integrate the functionality of entire multimedia systems on one interactive touch screen. You can walk into a boardroom and press system on and the entire system powers up, projectors lower from ceiling enclosures, screens lower, and everything comes on waiting for the next command. The commands are all on cute little buttons that are very user friendly. I worked my way up from install technician to system design engineer and thought, for one fleeting moment, that I would like to learn the programming side of our industry to round myself out. I enlisted that help of one of our programmers and gave it a whirl. Man, that was the worst two hours of my life. Hex, binary, code this, code that and all of these little symbols that mean something but look like the writings of a madman or Egyptian kicked my ass. I don't think the portion of my brain that will allow you to do these things is wired up. I do know that I had a headache for 6 hours or so after this little stunt. My hat's off to anyone who can do this and not slit their wrists from frustration.
by Ezy at September 24, 2003 9:40 AM
ooh, PHP and MySQL isn't anything like that. it's actually quite simple and logical, it's an open source language and there is much helpful geekery all over the place.
i do fine until i have to do nested loops and really complicated if then else unless this but only if that type things -- my brain has short circuits that kick in like some form of dyslexia, the only way i can make them work is to guess, and if they don't work, guess something different, until something finally works.
which is probably why i get so thrilled over the littlest things like this, it's a miracle i can do them at all what with all the brain damage and so forth.
by lizard at September 24, 2003 3:44 PM
It amazes me to see the blogs where the author has written their own code instead of using programs like MT. http://www.scottdavidherman.com/ and his blog http://www.erasing.org/ pull from the same database and work together. He's got over four years of entries all organized in a pretty package.
by MrBlank at September 25, 2003 9:39 AM
i'm *thisclose* to doing that. basically i have all the code written, it's just in different places doing different stuff, and needs to be pulled together. oh and a ping thing -- don't have one of those yet, but how hard can that be?
by lizard at September 25, 2003 11:11 AM
"Mostly Harmless", the title of a book written by Douglas Adams. I prefer the title "A danger to himself and those around him", personally.
by English at September 26, 2003 11:51 PM
i can rarely resist making douglas adams references.
by lizard at September 27, 2003 12:08 AM
Maybe "geekettery" would be a better term. You're being female makes your software/code proficiency all the more amazing. Most techno-geeks are dudes. I can't tell you how many times they've made me feel like less of a man cuz I wouldn't know a CD burner from a seedy hotel. It's like in the old days they'd do the same thing with their knowledge of car engines and such.
by anna at September 27, 2003 1:51 PM