Comments on: How to stop yourself from completely fucking-up your website

By: phil

phil — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:00:00 +0000

@Tony C: Great advice. I now use an external HDD with Tim Machine (OS X) but backing up is so important and it’s a really good idea to work it into your schedule like you have.

By: Tony C

Tony C — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:19:05 +0000

BACK EVERYTHING UP BEFORE YOU GO HOME!
This might seem excessive but just last week ive lost about 4 months worth of hard labour due to a catastrophic hard disk faliure. (luckily it was just a few projects i’d been juggling for my portfolio. Its not drastic enough to have to consider remortgaging/suicide) Its now part of my routine that i leave 10 mins a session to whack everything on a DVD-RW.

By: peter Morgan

peter Morgan — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:26:09 +0000

Nice little article – not much outside the standard but always good to have it reinforced. I like you honesty to. “scared the bejesus out of me” … its true! and mistakes never get any easier to deal with :-)

By: Mike Papageorge

Mike Papageorge — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:36:53 +0000

Hey Matthew, nice idea. I’ve tried having them set a cookie for site wide previews (rather then cloak), but even that gets some people confused.

@phil – Yeah, that is one downside. I do tend to check locally/on the dev version first when I can. Other times I just try to be quick with the ‘undo’ and ‘upload’ :-)

By: phil

phil — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:31:01 +0000

They both seem like good ideas that I wasn’t at all aware of.

Mike: sadly, I am the king of the syntax error so this approach may not suit me.

By: Matthew Pennell

Matthew Pennell — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 12:38:10 +0000

I do a sort of quick and dirty version of that, Mike; if what I’m testing is pretty simple, I just wrap it in an if statement looking for a querystring (for example, “?test=true”) so I can tell if it will break anything else on the page. This also makes it easy to send preview links to the client without having to explain user-agent strings to them.

By: Mike Papageorge

Mike Papageorge — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:07:53 +0000

When the case occurs that I need to do updates to a live piece of a site, I'll usually use some user-agent cloaking to test the new bit of code before unleashing it on the general public. Provided you don't make any syntax errors, this is a nice way to test things out behind the scenes.