December 2021

Submitted by Jeff on

Did not get as much done coding wise as I would have liked this past month. Turns out that making those changes to the libraries, had a drastic impact on the DynaBallot code. Doesn't help that I figured while I was at it I would work on some refactoring on some unrelated code. That pretty much meant that I end up rewriting much of the code. Though I did get more than half the project touched.

According the the PHP metric program that I am using I went from like 10 SOLID violations down to about 4 currently, and hoping to get down further. Most of the libraries are at zero violations, I might have a couple that still had one which I didn't spend much time on. The code is looking more manageable, which is a good thing in the long run. In fact there are things I didn't think I could do in the old code that I can now. Like making more customizable ballot forms, by ballot type just by simplifying my code. I might even end up with less code than what I started with, it will be interesting to see.

So there will not be any updates to the WhereAreGames site this month. However I think I found a new calling for the site. It is still going to do what it is now, but I might be looking at adding a function I was hoping not to dig into. I was reading a couple of articles on line and the program that I use data from for the army lists, the developer seems to have vanished from the internet. There is a group trying to build their own version, but to make sure that they don't store things too drastically different, I might need to make my own version. I am going to keep an eye on their progress and see what they come up with, hopefully my app will still be useful when they are done.

SEO-wise things seem to be pretty stable, not a lot of action but doesn't seem to be going down. I am hoping when I get some of these changes implement I can look at making my descriptions more engaging. As the apps seem to be showing in search, people just aren't looking at them.