2020-08-25
A new Camp Wireless that looks the same
The new Camp Wireless that looks almost the same, but is completely rewritten is on-line. It should look and work better on mobile devices. According to the statistics about half of the visitors is using a mobile device, so that is an important part. I am a great fan of not breaking existing links, so they will keep working. There is a change in the url scheme for the site, but all old links redirect to the correct new location. The details: Camp Wireless was completely written in PHP since the start of Camp Wireless in June 2004. But I didn't update the code a lot over the last years because I wasn't using PHP anymore and doing all my newer webprojects in modperl. This was becoming a risk, I didn't like updating the code anymore. I had to fix several things when I moved from the old homeserver to the new one because the new system came with PHP 7. Since the url design of Camp Wireless was 'technology neutral' from the start (the main urls do not include .php or other hints to the used technology) it was possible to rewrite it in another language, as long as it could handle all the urls the same way. I made one change to the url scheme: in the old setup the directory of campsites had urls with /database/region/ and /database/site/. Although there is indeed a database behind the site, the better term to use is directory, so I developed with /directory/region/ and /directory/site/ urls. And wrote a rewrite rule handler to redirect all the old links, because I don't like breaking old links. I rewrote the site it in modperl. It was hosted on the development webserver and after implementing and testing each function I committed the result to version control. I still use cvs because that's what I once dove into. After testing for a while with an acceptance version I finally made the switch today. After that I found a few functions missing so I added those promptly. Still using version control, so I know what I changed when and why. Update 2020-08-28: After a few days of keeping a close eye on the logs I notice the only errors in the site are caused by attempts to find wordpress installations on the site. Since there is no wordpress on the site those attempts will not find anything. Having done all the code updates I also put time in updating the site, so I added several campsites with wireless Internet that I found mentioned.