Commander one code software#
Commander one code plus#

Simplified enough, the website looked like this: MySQL ↔ WordPress(PHP framework, 3rd pty theme, custom CSS hacks) ↔ Minifiers ↔ Caches ↔ Apache ↔ Internet. Looking critically at this website, it also appeared to be an over-engineered monstrosity for the tasks it performed.

Commander one code software#

Having started programming with 8-bit Z80, I’m often quite baffled with how inefficient a certain piece of software must be to perform so slowly on modern hardware. It should be mentioned that IMHO the current state of the software industry could be fairly described as “dumpster fire” and manifests like this do resonate with me. The latter was more time-consuming but at least would provide some new knowledge and entertain a bit.

The first option was doable, but was also disgustingly boring and would leave me with even more hacks to maintain.

There were basically two ways to get there – either hack the existing WordPress instance even further or deploy something fresh. It was clear that somehow the website had to be moved to https. Not that encryption bothered me at all – who really cares about the fact that some person visited a website of a dual-pane file manager for Mac? But in 2018 web-browsers ignited a crusade against non-encrypted internet traffic and Chrome, for instance, started to happily print “not secure” next to the domain name. And, on top of all, at some point, I discovered that the theme referenced some external resources via hardcoded “ paths somewhere deep in its guts, which prevented me from making the website accessible via https. The HTML files spat out of the system was an incomprehensible pile of s which made a web browser choke. WordPress was slow as hell and needed echelons of minifiers and caches. As it turned out, the built-in flexibility wasn’t that high and the design involved quite a lot of CSS hammering. And, when really needed, to fine-tune elements via a custom CSS as a cherry on the cake.

Commander one code plus#

The idea was appealing – a WYSIWYG editor plus a range of various visual themes (both free and paid) with an ability to plug additional components on top. After some research, perhaps carried out incompetently, the verdict was to “just use WordPress and don’t reinvent the wheel”. And so it worked for some time until its age became clear and I had to find something else. It was already outdated, but seemed to be decent enough for my needs.

One semi-obvious choice from Apple was its software for simple web design called iWeb. However, as it turned out in 2013, this niche was already dead and everything moved into CMS-style systems with backend programming languages, databases, and other cruft. For such a simple website nothing else was required.

The intention was to find a simple WYSIWYG design system that would allow to slam together some content, export it as plain HTML files and then upload them to a server. A combination of NIH syndrome and a finance model of the project left outsourcing this task out of the question, so I had to pick my poison. App Store won’t even accept an application without URLs of general product info, a support page, and a privacy policy page. In my case, it was Nimble Commander – this app needed at least some presence on the Internet. Unfortunately sometimes one has to deal with it, for instance when developing a software product. Fiddling with bits & bytes and staring at assembly listings is much closed to me. Previously I occasionally had to hack around with various web software, so I got some understanding of how different components work and interact with each other, but generally that’s something I’d prefer to not touch at all. I have a complicated relationship with website-related technologies.