2009 in review: nine sites, one codebase, and hosting as my problem too

There is what I built in 2009, and there is what I actually spent the days on, and the two barely overlap.

What I built

2009 is the peak year for the strategy I started in 2008: small niche sites, produced in volume, each one a copy of the same hand-rolled PHP structure. Six new ones in that year alone, plus a larger system with its own CMS and an installer script, which is the first time I built something meant to be deployed more than once rather than copied more than once.

That installer is the interesting artefact. Copying a folder nine times had finally annoyed me enough that I wrote a program to do the setup instead. It is a bad version of what a package manager does, invented from scratch by someone who did not know package managers existed for PHP. They more or less did not, yet.

What I actually spent the days on

Almost none of the above. That December went on me and a hosting provider going back and forth. One site connected to a MySQL server on a different machine, and the connection kept dying:

Can't connect to MySQL server on '93.188.xxx.xxx' (4)

The fix was not code. It was a support ticket asking which IP the connection came from, then getting that IP added to an ignore list so their brute-force protection stopped blocking it. Two days, several emails, and Christmas Eve at the keyboard, for something that is now a firewall rule I would set myself in about a minute.

This is the part of 2009 that is hard to convey now. No per-project environment, no infrastructure as code, no dashboard where I could even see the rule. There was a phone number, an inbox, and someone else's working hours.

Fallback pages, because the web was not one web

The other recurring job: maintaining a second, simpler version of a page for visitors whose browser could not render the main one. Not progressive enhancement, an actual parallel page kept in sync by hand. Every richer experience shipped with a plain sibling, and keeping the two matching was somebody's job. It was mine.

That is the ancestor of everything I now believe about building the working version first and layering on top of it. I learned it the expensive way, by maintaining the duplicate.

Findability, before anyone called it SEO

Clients asked to be findable. The work was structural and has aged well: real titles, real headings, text that describes the thing rather than an image of text, URLs that mean something. The tactics that were fashionable that year have all been penalised since. The structural part is exactly what I would still do.

In short

Peak of the volume strategy, and the year I wrote an installer instead of copying a folder again. Most of the actual days went to hosting.