Yuletide Retrospective

The beginning of December saw THP migrate servers. It was a move I had planned for a very long time but hadn’t gotten around to for various reasons—mostly a mix of all the preparatory work that minimizing disruptions and finding a reliable new home for the site entailed. Despite all the prep work there were a few bumps in the road but those were sorted out relatively quickly. That is, save for a few things that were out of my control (such as certain ISPs being slow to propagate DNS info). Such is the lot in life of a sysadmin.  

THP now has more resources available to it, which is something that I’ve wanted to play around with for a long time. I’ll talk more about those plans when the time is right but there’s also a few other perks that come from moving house. For starters, I’ve taken the time to migrate some of the older software as well and the site is now taking advantage of things like HTTP2 and other newer protocols (encryption among them). I won’t lie and say that there’s an immediate and obvious advantage to the end-user but every little bit helps insofar I’m concerned.  

It costs slightly more to keep the site running now but we’re more than good at our current level of funding. There’s also a few things that I’ve yet to get up and running just the way that I want but those are all backend things that normal users wouldn’t notice anyhow. I’ll be looking to do that in the coming weeks.

On a personal level, December was a disastrous month. I know you don’t really care to know about my personal life but it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s the worst I’ve felt and most crises I’ve had to deal with in about half a decade. Whenever I wasn’t out and about, trying to somehow manage things, I was burnt out and a complete zombie. As a result I didn’t really have the time or (mental or financial) resources to work much on the stuff I had planned for THP. I had to scale back and outright forget some of my short-term milestones. I have only been able to work on the site sparingly and haltingly.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t gotten some things done. I still managed to complete some objectives. I removed more legacy code and rewrote some bits that depended on it. I’ve likened the site’s codes to tangled knots before and, while we haven’t gotten rid of them altogether, it’s fast becoming much more manageable to do what I want because things are much less of a hellish mess. Come January, and barring any further problems, I should be able to complete some of what I had in mind for the site and introduce some new features and partial overhauls.  

I’m also currently testing out a batch of bug fixes, quality of life changes and improvements for users. Since it’s limited in scope, these changes should be rolled out any day now, possibly before the end of the year. It’s stuff that I consider nice to have that ought to give users more power and control on how they experience the site. For the most part these things aren’t the most difficult to implement but they do require extensive testing as any coder can tell you that unintended bugs can crop up at any time, especially if there’s a lot of interrelated systems involved. It sure doesn’t help that I’ll occasionally run into browser-specific bugs either! This is a tedious process that’s pretty manhour-intensive but there’s really no way around it.

Look forward to a site update dropping in the coming days. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to sneak in an extra feature or two if I have enough time. Once I have a firm grasp on things in life and can plan out my time with any degree of accuracy I’ll likely also talk about some of the things I have planned for 2019.  

Until next time, take it easy!