One week, a dozen jobs, no two alike
Written by Walter. Edited by Tim, who decided it was true before it shipped. What that means.
Every Friday we go back over what we did that week. Most weeks it's a short list. This one ran long, and almost none of it was what you picture when you say "web work." Most of these sites run on WordPress, and hardly anything on the list was a new page or a redesign.
Here's the week, with the names left out.
Things that should have been talking to each other
Two stores, one blocklist. A retailer runs two online storefronts. When someone tried to cheat one of them, staff blocked that person there, and then had to remember to block them on the other store too. Sometimes nobody remembered. Now the two stores share one list, and a block on one shows up on the other within a minute or so.
A "Buy this print" button. A photographer's portfolio and a framing shop's online store were two separate worlds. Now every photo in the portfolio has a button that drops it straight into the framing shop's order page, ready for someone to pick a frame.
Approvals without the login. A gem wholesaler only shows its prices to retailers it has approved. Now an applicant's business tax ID gets checked before they can even submit, which turns away most of the spam on its own, and the wholesaler approves a real retailer with one click from an email.
Things that were quietly wrong
Sales tax that didn't add up. A payment form was charging the wrong tax whenever someone bought more than one of something. The form came from a paid WordPress plugin, and the bug was the plugin's own. Paid doesn't automatically mean good. The software wasn't ours, and the client didn't have the license that pays for its updates. We fixed the one calculation that was wrong, kept a copy of the original, and wrote down exactly what changed so a future update can't quietly undo it.
An add-on that crashed the site when you updated it. Every update took the site down, so it never got updated, which is its own kind of risk. This one was a paid plugin too. We took it out and rebuilt the small job it did, properly, so the site doesn't need it anymore.
An old shortcut nobody remembered. A publication's site had a years-old setting that let page content run code on the server. That's handy right up until it's dangerous. We replaced it with a narrower, safer version that does the one job it was actually used for.
Security scanners crying wolf. An events tool served its images from a different web address than the site itself, and security scanners kept flagging it. Each site can now say where its images come from, so those warnings stop and the real ones stand out.
Things that just take time
About 35,000 posts, saved as PDFs, overnight. A writer with years of posts wanted a copy of all of it somewhere he controls. We turned every post into a PDF in a shared Google Drive folder in one night, and the archive now adds whatever's new at 4 every morning.
The weekly update walk. Every week we go through the software updates waiting across the sites we look after, sort the safe ones from the risky ones, and do them. This week we also caught a few paid add-ons that weren't reporting their updates at all, which meant nobody knew they were behind.
The small stuff. A foundation's embedded donation form now matches the rest of its site. A nonprofit's report page got its own video chapter picker, so its videos play right there on the site, without the clutter and distractions of YouTube. And our own code review tool found a few small bugs in a plugin we released earlier this year, so we fixed those too.
And on the side
We also build things for ourselves, partly because it's fun and partly because that's how we learn what's possible.
- A security tester. We're building a tool that attacks a copy of a website, sealed off from everything else, and reports what it could break. Reading code finds some problems. Trying to break in finds others.
- A leaf pickup tracker. Tim's town posts its leaf pickup progress as a PDF of a spreadsheet and a hand-marked map. The tracker reads both and draws the progress on a real street map. The useful part isn't the leaves: it's taking information people made by hand and turning it into something you can search and use.
- Image generation on demand. Tim's image tool rents a powerful graphics computer only for as long as a batch takes, then shuts it off. It costs pennies a batch instead of a monthly server bill. It mostly makes cats and capybaras.
- A capybara game. Tim's kids rescue capybaras from floods, fires and people, then release them back to the wild instead of keeping them as pets.
What this means for you
- Write down the annoying things. The double blocklist and the hand-approved applications each cost someone a few minutes a day. Most fixes like those are smaller than people think.
- An add-on you're afraid to update is a problem to solve. There's usually a way out.
- Ask who watches your updates. If the answer is "it updates itself" or "nobody," find out what happens when one breaks something.
- Keep a copy of your own content. If your site disappeared tomorrow, could you get your writing back?
Someone asked us this week whether we could do a thing, and the honest answer to most of those questions now is "probably, yeah." If you have one, tell us about it.
We write these when something in the work turns out to be worth writing down. If you're hitting the thing described above and want a second set of eyes on it, tell us what's not working.