I started this page back in 2003.
In that year, WordPress released version 0.7. Altavista was purchased by Yahoo. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet. This was 3 years before jQuery’s first release. And even Joomla was yet to be released.
This was a full decade before I’d finally move this project to its own domain name. I didn’t use a version control system since I didn’t have a server in which to install subversion (or *gasp* CVS) and Git/Mercurial hadn’t been “born” yet.
D&D’s third edition still felt new. And I’m pretty sure I started this project before 3.5 came around.
My code was small, I just had a couple of pages and a handful of DB queries. But developing these tools can be so much fun… that the codebase grew. Organically… and messily. Even though I reused a lot of code, the technical debt was piling on. And I don’t spend that much time on this page, so the earlier I tackled this debt, the better.
So in 2019 I settled on MVC as my pattern of choice and picked a framework with which I felt comfortable. Said framework has had two major revisions, but upgrading to the newer version so far seems to be less painful than was moving my spaghetti code to an organized structure. In retrospect, I should have started earlier.
But now, as 2024 draws to an end I’m 99% done.
Yeah, it took me 5 years. But in my defense, I did say that I don’t spend much time here. And I did take a couple of detours, like when I realized I could write the Deckplan generator or the Subsector generator thanks to heavy code reuse. Both these generators took an amazingly small amount of time. Yes, they’re very rough on the edges (as usual) and unfinished, but they might be useful to someone somehow.
If all goes according to plan, future features and improvements should take less time to develop.