Zach Holman

Software is an interesting thing. It can do so many new things, but it brings a slew of new problems with it, too.

Something that I've been trying to grapple with lately is how to appropriately take an existing web site and push it into new-dom. (In other words, how I'm going to yank Good-Tutorials into something even better than it is now.) In many respects, I wish I didn't have the established base that Good-Tutorials already has. Backwards compatibility isn't just for the traditional software and OS realm; that same problem persists on the web, too. And it's much more difficult to deal with than how I originally thought it might be.

For example, the current issue that I'm dealing with right now is how to handle tutorial authors. Right now, there's no real author registration; authors just submit all of their tutorials under the same name and they can keep a collection of those tutorials through author pages (good-tutorials.com/author/author-name). I really want to start pushing for a user-centric site, where tutorials are tethered to usernames as opposed to just author names. This way you know for sure who submitted the tutorial, and this makes maintenance, support requests, statistics, and any other of the cool ideas I have in the back of my mind a world easier to implement. The problem is backwards compatibility. I have nearly eleven thousand tutorials that aren't set up this way right now. This means I either have to code additional features that let members reclaim old tutorials, figure out some way to do both, or perhaps another few creative solutions.

I lied though. I said that was the problem, but it's not the real problem. The real problem is implementing the solution. If you've been reading my blog, you know that I always try to keep a user-centric focus throughout development. When you're implementing solutions that necessarily have to be cumbersome for your users, you run into some potentially huge difficulties. The last thing I want is to make things overly confusing for users, particularly newer visitors that don't understand the flow of Good-Tutorials yet and are really quite impressionable about process and design on a site. It's important to keep pushing forward, but on the other hand you need to make sure that you're not throwing up hack jobs to score backwards compatibility.

It's rather unfortunate that things have to go this way. Admittedly, it would be nice to just have such a clear vision of the future that you can prepare for every contingency. But you can't. Five and a half years ago it didn't really cross my mind to have any sort of user functionality on Good-Tutorials. Anticipating and adapting to these changes is a slow process, not a sudden one. But it also is the nature of the web to change, and change is good. And in many respects, what matters is how you evolve the product more than how you create it.