What it got wrong

This site broke. Publicly. Let me tell you how, because the useful part is not that it broke.

I uploaded a new version. The home page came up with no styling at all, and every project link returned a not-found error. The files were all there. I had looked at the list myself.

Nothing looked wrong

The package I uploaded was built with a Windows command that writes the file paths using backslashes. Every program on my machine opened that package and showed a correct folder structure, because on Windows a backslash is what a folder path looks like.

The web host read the same package and saw something else. To it, a backslash is an ordinary character in a filename. So instead of a stylesheet inside a folder, it got one file with a very strange name, sitting in the wrong place. Same for every page in a subfolder.

Here is the part I want you to sit with. I had reviewed the file list before uploading. I read the paths with the backslashes in them and thought they looked correct. They did look correct. They were wrong.

A second kind of wrong

For a while this site published the internal command names for a dozen of my Civil 3D tools. Names that mean something to me and nothing to anybody else.

Nothing malfunctioned. I had asked for the tool descriptions to be published, and the descriptions contained the command names. It did exactly what I asked for. It was not what I wanted.

Two different problems

Those are not the same failure.

The first is output that is wrong in a way that looks right. The second is output that is precisely what you asked for and still not what you meant.

Neither one is caught by staring harder at the thing on your screen. That is what I got wrong: I was checking the work in the place where it was easy to check, instead of the place where it had to actually be correct.

Next time I will write about what I do about that, because "be careful" is not an answer.

Be Better - Assume you missed something.