I’m working on getting my legacy sites ready for an online portfolio to be presented here on this site.
The unfortunate thing about being a relatively-inexperienced web designer/developer is that most of your clients will be fairly small outfits and that much of your work will be necessarily pro-bono, or close to it. This means that many of them won’t be around for a very long time. In my case, none of them are. I think the Tecumseh Local Music Boosters may still maintain a site somewhere, though probably one with tildes in the URI that i’ll never be bothered to really track down, because it’s probably no longer my work being displayed there.
On to the point: this means that i have to re-build all of those old sites from the archives. Which, in turn, means trying to get code written a pretty long time ago (by www standards) to work. That’s not much of a problem, in most cases, because i at least had the foresight to include some useful future-compatible functions, the most underrated of which is the doctype declaration.
Regrettably, i don’t remember how some of the functions worked, and i don’t have much time to figure it all out.
The worst part, though, is that the one of the coolest sites, for a sadly defunct print magazine, won’t work locally, and i think it’s because i no longer have any idea what kind of a server environment it was written for.
So take this to heart, fellow amateurs: always, always, always include copious comments in your PHP, and archive a copy of the phpinfo() that you generated at the time (when you were literally losing sleep trying to iron out that one nagging bug). Mirror the damn thing live if you have to. This will save you in the long run, when the site goes belly up, and you have to prove to potential employers or clients that it existed outside of the sick, narcissistic fantasy world inside of your head. You won’t look like a blowhard when you can at least produce a working copy. Right now, i’d settle for just some screenshots of that magazine site.
Speaking of which, i can at least produce a static HTML version, using archive.org for the markup and my backup image files for the graphics. So all is not completely, irretrievably lost.
But i’d rather get those bugs ironed out. I just need a lot more time than i can actually come up with lately.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Loading ...