mahna mahna .net

Of course I noticed a rather complicated bug on this site the day after it launched. And of course it has to do with caching. Luckily it’s the sort of thing that only other web developers are likely to notice (and not even all of them).

No website is ever finished. Ever. Poor old mahnamahna.net 1.0, when it got frozen in carbonite in 2010, sported a label of “96% feature complete” on its home page because there were a few more niceties I fully intended to implement. Never got around to them. And sometimes things that are finished get unfinished by time. A couple of years back, the oldschool shared hosting that powers the old site imposed a PHP update that broke all the photo galleries in the museyroom. I never had time to sort that out. It is all decrepit, long-abandoned code anyhow, complete garbage by modern standards. A nightmare to even attempt to fix.

No website is ever finished. That’s why the early web was littered with those silly construction gifs. Remember those? Back then, we were up-front about the fact that there was always construction going on! Nowadays I’m not sure whether it’s that we just take all that ongoing construction for granted, or we pretend it’s not happening. At any rate, though I know it is super tacky in 2021, I’m keeping the goofy, vintage construction image on this site’s home page at least until the museyroom is open again.

Now that mahnamahna.net 3.0’s blog is up and running (on a modern, evolving platform that is as future-proof as anything related to the web can be), the next two site projects are: (1) migrate the old site’s blog content (including the comments) here, with redirection in place so that none of the old URLs break when this site eventually moves to its intended home at www.mahnamahna.net, and (2) build out photo gallery functionality for the museyroom, and migrate the old galleries here, again with redirection in place, because breaking old links that don’t have to break is the single worst sin a web developer can commit. (Sadly, they do it all the time.) St. Tim taught us in 1998 that Cool URIs Don’t Change, and he is still right. I do think there’s a corollary, though: If your links must change, add a redirection layer so that the old links take the visitor automagically to the new location. If you don’t do this, you are breaking the web!

Lots of work to do around here, but it’s a good feeling. Like when you move into a new place and it feels great, but you’re a bit overwhelmed by all the unpacking and the art-hanging and the cabinet-filling and all the rest.