23 February 2025

Starting point on this is while I've been using bitweaver for 20 years starting from it's precursor TikiWiki, remembering all that it does is almost impossible. Added to that I've put up with a few little niggles such as in this blog module when it would not take long to address them. So need to prioritise things a little better, which is already proving fruitful.

The code for all of the websites runs from a single copy and so any changes automatically update all the site. At one stage there were dozens of sites, but now I'm just down to half a dozen of mainly my own personal ones. I've got the development machine mirroring the active code and have Eclipse set up so I can manage the mirror, with Beyond Compare allowing me to port the fixes over to the live copy. The only gap with this is that the site specific sections make life a little difficult and I need to tidy that at some point. Basically there are only two subdirectories that are specific to each site, the storage folder has all of the static content along with 5 days backup of the database, and the config folder essentially has the style information for each site. Although that is actually simply a theme in the themes sub-directory. Most of the elements could be moved to the core packages and I may do that while trying to make theme management a little easier. The key individual element is the config file itself which has the functional setup for the site.

In addition to the config file, most dynamic configuration setings are stored in the database and I've been slowly reminding myself of just what settings I need to control. One of the niggles I've been playing with was the fact that pdf files on some of the sites were not creating thumbnails, and rather than fix it, I just hacked the missing files. So today I sat down and worked out what I was missing ... just switch the 'enable pdf thumbnails' on in the problem sites! Not sure why that is necessary when I have selected the mime format that uses them, but there was probably a good reason for it 20 years ago. While scouting around I stumbled across the next niggle's solution. Accessing the pdf's via ViewerJS was being blocked which I had put down to the browser complaining about things we are not supposed to do today. But the development machine was working fine so had to be something else ... and it was. I'd left allowing index.html off the Nginx config so of cause it was complaining ... and it was missing on half the conf files so at least that is now cracked, allong with uploading PDF's to any of them.

Now where did I put the Bug List - AH there it is - keeping everything separate was a good idea 20 years ago, and ALL of that material can be searched on each site, but would it be better today to merge all of the sites into one with various sections internally? At some point perhaps, but equally the links cross sites are not difficult to manage so later on the TODO list. I probably need to move the Bug List here. I've cleared both of the point 1 entries and need to work on some of the others. The crib sheets to remind me haw all of this works need to be in the Bitweaver-101 and that can stay on the Rainbow Digital Media site. And another niggle fixed was getting the highlight of search results working, another setting in the Liberty package.

I think I need to get stuck in on the styling on this site as it is just not as tidy as the other sites. Was a bit of a rush job at the time that never got addressed and now needs to be! So just what do I do to tidy it up ...