{"id":53,"date":"2019-11-24T12:34:05","date_gmt":"2019-11-24T12:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/?p=53"},"modified":"2019-11-24T12:34:07","modified_gmt":"2019-11-24T12:34:07","slug":"2019-update-and-the-history-and-future-of-the-code-that-was-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/2019\/11\/24\/2019-update-and-the-history-and-future-of-the-code-that-was-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 update, and the history and future of the code that was broken"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So the good news is I think it’s all back working. It’s hard<\/s> I can’t be bothered to test fully without simulating a whole competition – I ask for everyone’s patience and to report anything weird to me so it be fixed immediately! The items in the drop-down list on the guess form ARE the items that appear in the year’s calendar, so you may start strategising now! Guesses will open in a few days, unless you want to go ahead and guess your new PIN \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The various website systems being broken wasn’t a problem that wouldn’t have occurred back in the first running of competition – sixteen years ago (another one of those “wow, I feel old” moments) in 2003. The story is told on the 2003 page<\/a> and goes something like this – I had a Boohbah Advent Calendar, bought for me by me, as I remember\u00b9. I cannot think how that escalated into a competition to guess the pictures but evidently it did – I do however remember how it was run. The thirteen players comprised me, my eight closest neighbours at uni, a girl\u2122, two of my family and randomly, a friends mum\u00b2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it was a very manual process that year – those that lived in my block at uni could just tell me, and I would otherwise take guesses by phone and by email. I would manually update the website each day and them inform each player if they had scored. I would request guesses rather than leave them in place. I would update everyone on how it was going rather than just leave the onus on the players. I couldn’t last and it was the only year which operated this way. By 2004 the code that still largely (albeit tweaked) runs the website today was written, and I haven’t looked back since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was going to write about how the 2003 running panned out, but I’ll leave that for another time. The fact that the code remains largely that I wrote 15 years ago frustrates me a bit, but as I have previously written here – motivating myself to rewrite the code out-of-season is a bit of a push when it comes to motivating, and once it is the season I am using the site so feel less inclined to play with it. The solution is developing a new site alongside with a copy of all the data, obviously. I’ll try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The site look remains that of my website at the time – which is essentially aping the F1 Digital service’s onscreen graphics (the service existed from 1996-2002 in various countries around the world, but only 2002 in the UK. These graphics existed towards the end of its life). Blues and yellows and greys – in fact here are a few screen grabs I’ve cobbled together from YouTube. Look familiar?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Screengrabs from F1 Digital in 2002 – lovingly known at the time as “Bernievision”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I’m slowly letting go of these but I want to let them go completely. I envisage a more Christmassy coloured site, but more importantly than the colour scheme I want to get away from the things it’s locking in. The “messages from competition control” for example. I am 100% convinced that I could show data items currently shown here in a better way, for example. I also want to overhaul the stats pages a bit and not having a “graphics template” to work to will, I hope, allow me greater freedoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe next year then? We’ll see…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b9 I didn’t even know what a Boohbah was then, and frankly couldn’t explain very well if you asked me now! But that wasn’t important…
\u00b2 A theme that went on to be repeated in future years, though for some reason they never seem to last!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the good news is I think it’s all back working. It’s hard I can’t be bothered to test fully without simulating a whole competition – I ask for everyone’s patience and to report anything weird to me so it be fixed immediately! The items in the drop-down list on the guess form ARE the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-website","content","has-not-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acc.scriv.me.uk\/moredepth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}