Website Maintenance

[dubiousdisc]

I use the same thing as Nyx for the dates and I never have to update the footers, wheeee!

Luckily most of my sites are for finished things so I don't need to touch a lot of things. I don't clean up links and the like on a schedule or anything, more like whenever I happen to revisit a site I have and go, ah yeah, these links have been dead for a while...but, I don't make a big deal out of it. That's how the internet is. I'll change them whenever. As for what concerns the content that's up to me, once in a LONG while (years rather than months) I will go back to a site and do a little bit of editing and check if there's anything else that I should be adding. I did that most recently with my Malice site: I opened the site in 2011 and I left it pretty much unchanged for the last three years, and when I went back a few months ago I edited a couple things and added a few new paragraphs about things I hadn't thought about at the time.
The rest of the time I have the same disease as Larissa, in which there's some things that I'm just not touching because I'd want to remake the entire site, heh.

[Mikari]

I love includes :D You can also have holiday greetings that come up on the right day, layouts that change (but not make) themselves and lots of fun stuff. :D (here are my notes on that)

[Robin]

Y'all coding geniuses are automating all these bits of your sites and I'm over here just...*poke at PHP* *PHP growls* *run away*

(Seriously, I'm learning more from this topic than I do from reading most web design stuff ^^;)

[nyxmidnight]

There's no denying that PHP is hard, though. It feels like these bits are things everyone should know about and so there are not that many tutorials on them. It took me a whole afternoon to find one understandable tut on highlighting different items in the menu depending on what page you are, seriously.

[Robin]

@Nyx: Wow, I didn't even know PHP could do that! I hand-coded that kind of menu in HTML once (and swore never to do it again ROFL). :D

(The other thing about most PHP tutorials is that most of them are written in techie jargon rather than plain language. It's like you already have to be a super-experienced developer to even teach yourself this stuff. I need an English-to-PHP dictionary xD)

[nyxmidnight]

It can! It's not even difficult! But as you say, the PHP tuts I mostly came across either take for granted you know how to do this thing already, or explain it in incomprehensible jargon.

[dubiousdisc]

+1 on everything Nyx has said - I don't feel particularly comfortable with PHP either because I feel like I get the harder things but sometimes I'm missing the tools because...nobody even mentions them. One day I'll have to go back to the basics and just do baby tests with everything just to see what obvious, easy things that I should really know I'm missing.

And yeah, once I had to make that sort of menu, and I had to guess a way to make it work and it was probably very dumb and could have been much smarter, but it...worked, I guess (accessing a page would cause a variable to be set, the menu items would run a check on that variable being set, and if it was set it would add something like id="current" so I could manipulate the look of the set item in the CSS, Nyx please let me know if the way you had was any smarter than this).

But the thing about techie jargon is a plague of computer science as a whole, it's a field full of nasty nerds who put their entire self-worth into being having the biggest and hardest knowledge, writing in jargon (and if you don't get it's your fault, never their fault for sucking at explaining the simplest things) and yelling at anyone who doesn't know something and/or dares to think outside the box and finds a completely different approach to a problem.

[Robin]

@Dubs: YUUUUP. So much elitism in tech fields in general...much argh.

(Not to mention the sexism of "oh, you're a girl, you probably don't know how to do this so let me show you to prove my e-manhood..." -_-)

[dubiousdisc]

Yeah, don't even get me started >_>

[Destinie]

@Nyx omg that is awesome! I need to become a PHP master!!!

I haven't updated my older sites in a long time. I am debating on making a little graphic to put in the corner of the pages to indicate that they are in archive mode and I probably won't be touching them. For the most part I like how they are but there are some I have been debating on closing. But I am leaving them up because I have been told people like seeing them.

I have been switching my gears and working more on nyarth.net
I'd like to do a redesign for Thunderstorm one day - maybe in 2015.

I used to do a lot more in the way of touching up my sites and would like to come back to them every month or few months. I feel like a bad shrine owner recently....