Sleep is such a nice thing.
Hello... I'm such a happy camper today. I got some sleep last night finally. Well, I actually left work early yesterday and slept during the day and then woke up spent some time with the fam, got some things done that I wanted to get done and then went to sleep at a reasonable hour. It's amazing what 6+ hours of continuous sleep can do to improve your mood. ;-)
This blogging software I'm using now is definitely going to be a continuous work in progress that will never be done. It's the constant tinkering of someone who's working on a project for themselves. If I was using Blogger, for example, I would just accept the rough spots because there's not much I coudl do about them, but because I wrote the code for the blog you're reading now, I'm constantly thinking about ways to improve it. Now that the dates seem to be working I can start to focus on smaller items that need improvement.
The first thing I need to do, actually, is to clean the code. I did the first part of my new motto: "get it done" but then the second part "refactor, refactor, refactor" hasn't come around yet. This whole blog, including stuff you don't see like the editing and deleting parts, are all in ONE jsp page. It's like 30k and probably 1500 lines long. I need to go through and clean it up quite a bit. Combine functions, reduce the number of times my poor DB is being hit. Every time I added a new part to the db, I just did another hit to MySQL. It can handle it, but I can tell the page is taking longer to load now. I'm sure I can reduce the number of queries by a lot. Most of the data is static too...
Working on my Journal, I'm thinking about using Apache's Velocity engine as a templating engine. This'll force a bit more of MVC on me since I won't be able to do horrible hacks directly on the page. Maybe instead of refactoring this page using only Java, now that I've got the majority of the code down, I can move over to Velocity directly, just copying the logic into Macros to be used by the scripting stuff. We'll see how it works out. It's VERY ugly right now behind the scenes...
But refactoring is really the fun part, no? Cleaning up, moving stuff around, making it tighter and easier to understand later. Removing the crud that you left in there and knew you should have cleaned up and didn't. It's like wiping away the guilt. :-)
Okay, to work. Testing today... let's see if I can clean some bugs!
-Russ