Wow TiddlyWiki reminds me of how I got started with web development in all the wrong ways.
I told my Dad I wanted to make a website for my favourite computer game so he sat me infront of MS Frontpage and got me started. After I while I got to the point i've made a forum but all the comments where dummy text in static HTML, so my Dad setup PHP on the computer and basically left me to it with a single index.php file and a intro to PHP book. The problem was when I looked things up, I was always asking the wrong questions. So instead of asking, "how can I store comments in a database and then fetch them for displaying?", I asked "how can I append a new comment to my HTML file?". I wound up with some crazy (working!) forum where every time a comment was added it would append to a HTML file. Then I wanted a more complex layout I had to figure out how to use a regex to append it in the right place. Then even more crazy regex to handle editing and deleting comments. Then when the file got too big I wanted to add pagination and this took me ages to get right shifting comments between pages when a comment was deleted so there was still 10 per page.
Eventually I discovered that databases exist and i've been a web developer for 18 years now.
Crazy to think there's now a cool use case for an entire app stored in a single .html file. Maybe I wasn't as dumb as I thought back then.
> every time a comment was added it would append to a HTML file
Hey static sites are a thing that keep coming back no matter how much things change. It doesn't matter how fancy your back-end for rendering/populating a website is when at the end of the day a lot of sites really really have no real need to be that dynamic. They could easily be rendered out to static files and be much more performant. Not to mention that if your backend falls over you still have some simple static files to spit out so people might not even notice downtime.
I don't think that's the wrong way to start with web development, especially as a kid. This gives you thorough understanding of why everything we use today is good to use, because you faced the exact problems these things want to solve.
I remember also starting building a forum and browser games using text files as database :)
Essentially CSV files pretty much, although I didn't think of them as CSV or similar.
Sounds pretty efficient to me! Super cacheable, do effort on each write instead of each read, etc etc. Also I bet it reduced your time-to-shipping tremendously vs first learning databases. That reward cycle might matter more than following “best practices”!
Remember, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing half-assed.
I love this story! Reminds me of when I learned programming, in a similar I guided way. I wanted to build an environment to script football player movement on a pitch, and even got some basic interpretation working. But, I had no concept of arrays, so I had to maintain two functions to interpret a string, one for each team. I.e. Move1 and Move2... Good times
I told my Dad I wanted to make a website for my favourite computer game so he sat me infront of MS Frontpage and got me started. After I while I got to the point i've made a forum but all the comments where dummy text in static HTML, so my Dad setup PHP on the computer and basically left me to it with a single index.php file and a intro to PHP book. The problem was when I looked things up, I was always asking the wrong questions. So instead of asking, "how can I store comments in a database and then fetch them for displaying?", I asked "how can I append a new comment to my HTML file?". I wound up with some crazy (working!) forum where every time a comment was added it would append to a HTML file. Then I wanted a more complex layout I had to figure out how to use a regex to append it in the right place. Then even more crazy regex to handle editing and deleting comments. Then when the file got too big I wanted to add pagination and this took me ages to get right shifting comments between pages when a comment was deleted so there was still 10 per page.
Eventually I discovered that databases exist and i've been a web developer for 18 years now.
Crazy to think there's now a cool use case for an entire app stored in a single .html file. Maybe I wasn't as dumb as I thought back then.