Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl...
by jrockway on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:37PM
(#20594888)
You would be surprised. Many years ago I worked on a CMS for a large household-name client. Their entire website was made up of individual HTML pages. No shared header, footer, or anything; if you wanted to update one of those, you would be updating it thousands of times.
My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.
Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.
What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.
My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.
Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.
What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.