10 February (Part 2) - Bonkers has been to Weight Watchers
A little bug
showed up this afternoon which for a short while put Bonkers off line and is
still not fixed (†), but basically the site is ready for further development as and when any
Bexley news comes along.
Why did I bother? Well those 40,000 files and 100,000 hyperlinks were getting
to be beyond practical management and the limited software tools I have were not up to fixing it, in
fact occasionally they screwed things up further.
The home made code was getting into a right old muddle and there was lots that
was simply a hangover from the distant past and was ripe for the chop. The
routines that at one time put up little advert panels (no longer required) also grabbed the current
date and used it for page titles. (Definitely required.)
The code that allowed users to change font
size which was incompatible with use on Mobile devices was still there but
disabled. So was the code that would wipe the banner image clear of text and
icons for a clearer view. More recently the Facebook links were still there but
not in use. It was a big haystack and there was no knowing what might be lurking there.
Not long ago I found a page that referred to a Cabinet Member who had reported
me to the police for allegedly harassing his daughter. At the time I wasn’t even
sure he had a daughter, I certainly didn’t know her name and she didn’t get a
mention here but I had somehow harassed her. A report from a neighbour had
pointed a finger in her direction, again without names so how could I know? The
police climbed down after six months with me on tenterhooks but he left the Council last
May so I
removed references to that incident from the site.
Recently I discovered one page remained. I know how, I removed all the pages
that were linked from an Index page. One had been missed off that Index page.
Manually hunting around I found a few other errors. The Menu is produced by a
free utility. The code is not complicated but there is a lot of it. Sometimes I
use the utility, at other times I merely tweak what it generated last time.
I found that because of that, a Menu item was coming and going. Or rather going
and coming. It went when I tweaked the code and came back when I
auto-ran the
utility. Maybe not the biggest of problems, it would have given a Page not Found error.
A few folders which I felt might be useful one day were password protected and
the links removed. A utility I used rarely and which is supposed to clean up the
site managed to put some of it back. A page devoted to the worst of Cabinet
Member Craske’s excesses came back while I was convinced his reputation had been protected.
How could one trace any more among 40,000 pages? Reading them all would take a month
of Sundays. I hit on a quicker way. Take them all off line. For a while I
considered leaving things that way but enough messages came in to encourage
otherwise. “I see you as a sort of Public Service Broadcaster”. And from a
Councillor, “I use it for checking back on old things, better sometimes than the Council’s website.”
Hence the decision to continue but with very much slimmed down code and a whole load of pages
disappeared completely instead of just being hidden and the danger that someone
would remember where they were.
Do we really want to know about the Chief Executive who engineered a £300,000
sickness pay off, a £50,000 pension which we are still paying and who promptly
got himself a similar job elsewhere? Similarly the Council Leader who enjoyed his
Council provided credit card rather too much.
Is anyone other than me interested in an archive of old Home pages going back ten years?
What about the page that displayed all the various banner images as a list and
with the press of a button allowed the overlaid text to change colour? I bet no
one but me knew it was there.
Does anyone care any more which Mayor wrote to a member of the public to
reprimand him for not clapping her loudly enough?
The old Blogs, now renamed Comment which may allow more off-topic material, will
gradually return. The very oldest already have. There is nothing controversial
in them because I didn’t go to a Council meetings until the end of 2010. Then
they accused me of Harassment for “criticising Councillors”. Probably that one
will come back as will all the meeting reports.
Old blogs are now going into a new folder named comms - just to be both
different, short and alphabetically more or less unchanged.
I had thought I would leave it that way to break old Google links but a switch
has been introduced just in case. Currently links to folder /blogs/ reroute to /blogs/
but that is easily switched off. Auto update of pages is also turned off at the moment which is a bit of a pain
but it was that sort of thing that led to the muddle in the first place
Normal service or something near it has resumed on Bonkers.
† Fixed a few hours after writing the above. A simple typo in the code.