tangophilia blog

I’ve rediscovered the joy of functions in PHP, and have cleaned up my pages to separate the presentation logic from the presentation code. Pages are about the same file size, but should be easier for me to maintain. From the perspective of you viewers, here are the two changes you might notice.

1. Presentation of date information is determined based on the date ranges of the event. Dates are presented differently based on whether the event is a single-date, multi-date or weekly event.
2. There’s a little indicator on events that are less than 31 days away to let you know how many days are left until the event, or if a class is in progress, if you can still sign up.

The beauty of logical structures (and database driven sites) is that they make it possible to have things happen automatically because the software can follow the rules I set out. I would never have bothered to put this type of presentation on my old site because it was all hand-coded and I simply can’t be bothered to update x-number of pages by hand on a frequent basis.

Of course, the question is, will anybody find these changes helpful? Maybe, maybe not. But just like in tango, sometimes it’s worthwhile to explore some ideas because the exercise will open up other possibilities, and because small and subtle improvements can add up to bigger improvements over the long term.