Henry’s Basement
A few nights past, I was knocking about in Henry Roesner’s basement and we came across a Courseboard that I hadn’t seen before. Henry told me where it came from. I don’t rightly recall where that was, but it reminded me that there is quite a collection of them on this site and I requested that one to add to it. Now there isn’t anything particularly special about this Courseboard. It is dated April, 1989. By then, I had been a member for a few years and many of you had been a member for eons.
Anyway, I went online today and added the document to our online Courseboard library (https://glenmarsailing.org/dropdown_form.php ) but was more than mildly annoyed to see that I couldn’t fetch it back again. This led to a little poking around in some files and discovering that none of the last 5 Courseboards could be fetched as a historical document (as in using the link above). All of the old ones worked just fine, but nothing new. After a short but intense session relearning how to debug php code, I was able to find the problem and apply a band-aid. Interestingly, however, the fix is truly just a band-aid. We have WordPress code piled on top of php code piled on top of html code, and spread out all over the place. I always think “Well one these days I’ll go in there and clean it all up, but just like the second garage, those days just don’t seem to be coming. If you’ve lived in a place long enough, there are buried treasures that you may dig up and know for sure that you’ve seen them before, but have no clue why you still have that stuff. In a website, the same thing occurs, but if you throw it out, not only might you need it the very next day, but worse, you may find that you were using it all along and just didn’t know.
That kind of happened with this Courseboard. I found a couple of files (real important ones as it turns out), that were quite literally in the wrong place and were in use. I know they need to be moved so that me, or any other half way competent coder would know where to look, but – they work fine where they are and who knows what would have to change if I relocated them. Maybe someday I’ll clean it all up.
About that Courseboard, April, 1989. I took the time to read it and guess what. It’s no more interesting than the current ones – probably less so. Here is a direct link if you are also inclined: https://glenmarsailing.org/wp-content/plugins/Courseboard/docs/CourseBoardArchive/1989%20-%20Apr%20Courseboard.pdf
There were a few other things that we came across at Henry’s place, and I will comment about those in a future post.