Entries Tagged 'Reflection' ↓

Those of you who look at the site regularly: You’ve probably noticed that there are a lot of broken pages. That problem should be rectified within the next few days.

Note to any programmers out there: As much as I value practice through experimentation, there is something to be said for finding out how to do things right before you put everything together.

Case in point - When putting links to vital PHP scripts for each page, I used static links. Yesterday, our lovely host had to move the site to another server as an emergency measure…thereby breaking every single static links for these vital bits of script that the pages are built with. I’ve fixed most of them, but it will undoubtedly take me days to find them all (and maybe not even then…).

And all this, simply because I was ignorant for the longest time of the simple PHP global variable $_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT‘], which would have prevented this whole thing in the first place by locating each file relative to the root directory of the site.

Sigh.

If you know of any pages that are broken, leave a comment or E-mail webmaster@thedeconline.com. Your help is greatly appreciated.

In November 2006, I was a first-semester student here at Millikin (although far from a first-year student in general - I’d been in college for about 4 years previously). I’d played around with web stuff for quite a while, having become a webmaster for another site the same year and developing personal knowledge on my own. As a publishing requirement for my major, I took web publishing that first semester with the ever-delightful Dr. Randy Brooks, which was a fun experience that helped expand my knowledge further.

Then at the end of the month, I received an E-mail from Dana Williams, the recently hired assistant adviser of the Decaturian saying she’d been given my name by Dr. Brooks as a possible candidate for the position of online editor. And the rest, while not quite history, happened from there.

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