Author: Dale Anderson

I have been contemplating the pros & cons of two different approaches to store and display the Shared Excel Tools solutions. This site is a wordpress site and the first working version stored VBA solutions as posts in the typical wordpress manner. This was & is sufficient but it has some cons. With the different parts of a solution (ie brief description, images, code) stored in a wordpress database, version control, as I understand it, is quite simplistic. For each update, a new record is created that is connected to the original via the database schema. This is sufficient in general but I prefer the Git approach with a summery of changes and a comment to describe them. Git also has no limits on the number of changes while wordpress has a limit after which the older versions are dropped. Without particular protocols in place, this could lead to lost data or information.

I have also been disappointed at the number of times I have had html tags inserted into my posts by wordpress. There are times that I feel like I am fighting the ‘system’ to get the content to display as I want.

An alternative I have played with is to store the SET solutions in their own folder with separate files for each of the components of the solution. This strays away from the typical wordpress installation so it risks complicating things and creating lots of unnecessary work but it has benefits as well. It allows version control via git. It allows more straight forward editing of content and no risk of wordpress compomising the data. On the other hand, wordpress functionality like ‘searching’ could be largely compromised.

It might be that I need a combination of both.

Site is now online with the core functionality working pretty much as I want. Probably the biggest task at present is to upload the scripts and tools I intend to share. Many served a purpose at the time I built them and were not necessarily bullet proof. Hence I need to review each bit of code before uploading. Hence I will be doing that over a few months I expect.

Still, I can’t say version 1.0 is finished yet. It is online and functioning but there are still details to finish yet.

Tasks to complete for launch are:

• Final styling checks
• Remove obsolete category from main searches or put to the end
• Adding solutions from my library
• Add a ‘contributors’ page – just me for now

At that point I will call v1.0 finished and will come back to it when I am ready to work on v2.0.

Getting closer to an official launch. This site has been on the back-burner for many years. Accepting a less ambitious site that can be developed over time has been a good choice. Reminding myself of the core need of the site let me shed a lot of ‘nice to have’ features which had been dragging on the project.

The number one purpose for this site is a location to store Excel VBA tools to allow quick and efficient access. A big part of that is having appropriate filters such as sections, categories, tags and related grouping which allows the user to quickly find what they need. With the relatively small number of ‘solutions’ I will add, the current selection criteria should suffice. It will be relatively straight forward to add other filtering methods if it is ever required.

Tasks to complete for launch are:

• Add syntax highlighting to the code box
• Styling
• Adding solutions from my archive
• Add an ‘about’ page
• Add a ‘contributors’ page