Feb. 11, 2022

My entire thought process and steps to making updates to this website

9:45 PM

This is a first, I'm going to be writing about my process while I work on updating this website. It's honestly been around a year since I last made any major updates to this website. The last update I did was back in September to fix a bug. Anyway, here goes.

First I put on some music to put me in the mood to work on this task. I am honestly so messed up in the head in terms of just having so much pleasure and addictions fulfilled the past entire year or longer that every day tasks are so boring to me. This is why I badly need a dopamine detox. When I worked on making this site back in February 2020, I worked like 8+ hours a day on it and that was all I did. I don't even know if I played music in the background at that time. But yeah, I just really messed myself up the past year. I was also the best employee at my workplace probably back then, self-proclaimed, but I also got complimented a lot, and now I'm just a shadow of my former extremely productive self.

Anyway I have some music playing now, and now I have to generate a new github token to update the site later. Github is a version control website, and version control is basically just versions of some code or program you have. Like if I make an update to this site, that will be a new version. And you can use github to look at any past versions and past changes and so on. So I use that to manage the versions of this site and to make updates and so on.

Github like basically every other website nowadays, works like a social media site. There is a social feed when you log in about the work and updates other people you are following have done. There is a person I'm following on Github who has 4500 contributions in the past year. He is always active on my homepage whenever I log on, he is always the top and most active person, it has updates saying "so-and-so did this today" and he is all over my feed. Basically he made updates to different programs and sites and things over 4500 times in the past 365 days which is ridiculously insane. Now that's a great work ethic.

Okay done, I finished generating a new token. This is just some security thing that allows me access to control my github projects, it's basically a glorified password.

Now the feature I want to work on is to create an "18+" feature for journal entries, because I sometimes write about topics that should really have an 18+ warning somewhere. What should this be called? Maturity warning? I don't know. For YouTube, they have this new section called "Is this for kids?" but uhh, that doesn't sound appropriate here. Ah, I just looked it up. This kind of thing is called "Content Rating" or "Maturity Rating". I am just going to put two options, if it's either for "Everyone" or for "18+ only"' and it will be labeled "Maturity Rating". Yeah that's fair.

I'm also backing up the website right now. I have to do this so I can have the latest version to work with and just in case something happens to the website. It's very important to do this often or else serious data can be lost for whatever reason. Okay done, and I got the local server to run. So everything looks good!

The annoying thing is that this is all command line stuff, so I have to memorize and remember a lot of commands to do a lot of things. Luckily I have done this hundreds of times so I fully memorized all the commands, well, most the commands. There are some scary commands that can break everything, luckily I don't use them that often, but I should because they're critical. Making server changes and updates always has a chance to break things and yet I need to run those commands. I will schedule an update for everything on Sunday, February 13th because it's been a while since I updated everything on the backend and there's a lot of new versions of stuff.

Anyway, now that the backup is done, I can now work on the update. I will first have to update the database so that journal entries can store a maturity rating value. I will just make it store a boolean, which is a yes or no value, for the maturity rating. If it's Yes, then it is 18+ only, if it's No, the default, then it's for everyone. Okay done, now I have to refresh the database basically, okay done.

Now I have to edit the journal entry pages so that a new field is underneath "Visibility" that talks about the maturity of the content.

Okay if I am being honest, I barely remember how to do all of the steps I have done so far, and everything I have yet to do to complete this. It has honestly been a long time since I did any of this. I don't know how I'm succeeding so far, but it's working. I'm making the correct steps. But yeah it has been a long time since I have done this, just being honest. Even though I created the site and every feature and whatever on the website, I don't remember most of this!

Okay done, I added the maturity rating to the new and edit journal entry pages. Now I have to go and test them. Okay it looks way better above the "Visibility" setting than below, so I updated that. Okay I spent a while, probably like 15 to 20 minutes, just playing around with the appearance. I tried a bunch of things but I guess looking like the Visibility field is the best look.

Now I have to update the backend to be able to load and save this data. Okay done, that was extremely easy. I tested it too and it works fine.

Now I want to update the Public Journal entry page to give a distinct look to these 18+ journal entries. What kind of new appearance should they have? Honestly these boxes in the Public Entries page are already quite full. What more can they have? It just needs to say 18+ somewhere I guess. Okay, done. Now I need to add it to the title when a person clicks open an entry. Wow, done. This was super fast and easy.

Now I need to make it so that only users who are logged in can view the entry, this way the entry is not public. They will just be redirected to the main page and a "You need to be registered to view this entry" error will appear. There is no birthdate information saved on the website, so there is no way to verify if a person really is 18+, but hopefully the warning is enough.

Everyone who signed up has to at least confirm they are 13+. Every website does this because there are legal requirements where all users have to be 13+ or at least have parental permission. I remember when I was a kid and I was under 13 visiting a bunch of websites, websites for kids, and I couldn't sign up because I would enter my birthdate and I would be under 13 years old.

Okay done, I made it so that if they try to view the 18+ entry and they are not signed in, it will just redirect them to the homepage and ask them to log in. I think that should be all for this update.

Okay now I have to do one final testing and then move everything up to the servers and then apply the changes there. Okay I finished testing, everything looks good. Now I just have to do a final code review to make sure there's no weird updates or whatever. Code review looks good! Time to push this update to the server.

This part is all command line again, so it's a little stressful.

DONE! I pushed the update and then I refreshed this page, and the new "Maturity Rating" setting is available right there. Whew. Finally done.

Honestly, this update was very easy to implement. However, there's a bunch of code especially in the Public Entries page that is quite complicated that I wouldn't be able to implement again from scratch now without a bunch of reading and researching. Like to load the journal entry cover photo and view count and comment count and user information such as user level and profile picture for every journal entry, it's sort of complicated. It's complicated because all the items I just named all belong to different database tables, so it has to do this very weird lookup process of finding all that information, and it does it in a very streamlined, fast way. There's many ways to do it, some would have made it so that the page took like 30 seconds to load or something, but yeah I made it very simple and fast, and yet I don't remember exactly how to do that, even though the code is right there for me to read.

Sigh. Okay well that's that. I am going to write about my day now and then log into the AYearAgoToday account to post the update and so on.

I feel extremely bad right now because well I don't know why, but I just do. I watched some anime sort of. I ate a lot today, four entrees, and an Acai Bowl and Pitaya Bowl.

Well, I know why I feel bad now. A few hours ago I logged into this thing where I used to be the #1 person there, or the #2 person, it's a pretty significant thing and no it's not a game I'm referring to, and now I am like rank 40 or so. I'm still in the top 50, but I could have been rank #2 or rank #1 still if I didn't make terrible choices. This makes me feel very regretful and depressed. Although in reality this makes almost no difference and I am still very high ranking, I'm just not as high rank as I could have been had I made all the right choices. There's many such cases like this, and thinking about all of them makes me feel pretty down. Yes I will forever just allude to this, because it would be stupid to go into more detail in this, but it's a positive thing and a sort of significant thing, I just don't want to go into more detail except be weirdly generic that I lost my position somewhere.

I wish I were in a relationship where I could just cuddle with someone right now, that things will all be okay. I hope Riley is fine with me visiting her or whatever and staying with her for a bit. I'll ask her next week once I lose weight and I get ready to fly back to the States. Or whomever. I just hope someone is fine with me visiting, but for now I think I like her the most out of all my matches. I haven't talked to any of them in a week though since I haven't logged into any social media in a week.

The time right now is 11:43 PM, so it took me around two hours to make that update, including writing my thought process and steps as I went along. I don't know why I did all this by the way, I was just bored and insecure. I didn't want to make the updates alone, I wrote about it to feel less alone as I wrote. I hope some people read this entry at least. Whenever I see views in my entries, then I feel pretty good that some people are reading the stuff I wrote.

Anyway yeah I didn't do much the rest of the day today. I had a work meeting today too, and it was another short meeting. My clients are really fine with me delaying all the time and not even doing much work. They are always like "yeah no problem, have a great weekend!" very friendly and forgiving people. I haven't been doing much work the entire past year in all areas of my life because of my pleasure addictions. I think I am a messed up person.

Anyway, tomorrow I eat nothing again for a whole week. That's my plan, no food for an entire week. Seven days. Then I can talk to my matches again and talk to people on messenger again. On Instagram, I already have 5 people who messaged me, likely 4 of them are from matches and 1 is likely from RadicallyWild. I didn't click the paper airplane icon to view who messaged me and a preview of what they wrote, so I have no idea who wrote to me and what they wrote.

There's still music playing in the background. I just played some songs I used to play back when I was working and programming in that dark and obscure cubicle office. I felt like I was drowning and caged every single day going there, sitting down, and just staring at the computer screen working. Now that I am free to work from home or wherever else in the rest of the world, I am much more free, but I am still pretty limited.

I think we think that celebrities and famous and rich people have so many choices and so many freedoms and whatever, but it's not really true. We are all human and can only do so much. I can only do so much. Even though I am free now, and I am in a room with much better lighting, and I can do whatever I want here instead of being limited to the cubicle, I still feel a little stuck, a little like drowning, and a little like a prisoner.

Even though I created this website and whatever, honestly I don't have that much more power than a regular user. I think we all think that Mark Zuckerberg has so much power over FaceBook, but he doesn't. He has his own terms and agreements he has to agree to, and he can't really do that much more other than banning people or deleting posts, he can't decide what other people post or what pictures they upload or friends they add or messages they send or anything. He is a slave to his own platform.

It reminds me of The Beatles and how they wrote all their songs. Michael Jackson bought all the rights to their songs and kept them. So even if you make something, you can be a slave to it, and you can have no power over it. Even if you write a book or something you can be completely wrong about characters and lore and whatever, even if you made it all yourself. I've seen fans correcting creators of some works because the fans knew more about the lore than the creators themselves.

So in a way, we are a slave to our creations, whatever creation that may be. If it gets placed in a museum or someone else buys it, you no longer have any power over it. It's like YouTube, created by those three guys, they sold it and no longer have any power or any influence over it. Even when they created it, they didn't have any power over what content its users posted or anything they did within the site. It's like that for every website and game. Gamers exploit cheats or hack into games all the time.

Anyway I don't even know what I'm ranting about. That's my day today. The current time is 12:01 AM. I just wanted to mention that because I was writing this whole time and wrote many paragraphs in the past 10 minutes. Time to go post about this update.

Oh yeah I also updated and renewed the Habitica challenges this morning.

Written by JustMegawatt

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