My last update on Random Anime V6 was.. back in January.
As you might imagine, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it, but it also means I haven’t made a lot of progress on it either.
The API is “done”. I completed the database re-structure as well as the API re-write (done in PHP). When I say “done”, I mean it works locally-ish. I was starting to re-factor my local instance of random anime to use this new API when I started hitting roadblocks.
Little things here and there that were slowly adding up. Whether it was a small API bug, weirdness getting the UI to work with the new API format, or anything in between. It’s already a bit of an effort to get myself to work on projects these days, and these little roadblocks were absolutely throwing me off my game.
Between work and life, I had a bad week last week. When looking at this project, I started thinking - what’s the point? The site works fine as is. Why am I doing this?
Does it modernize code that I wrote forever ago? Yes. Does it introduce lots of headaches as I re-visit issues that I solved in the past and didn’t think of in the present? Also yes.
So I took a step back. If the site is operating fine from a UI/API perspective, what can I do to improve it? What changes need to be done to keep the data up to date? So I settled on the following:
- Adding new anime each season and as people suggest
- Updating anime’s scores and episode counts
- Keeping anime streaming links up to date
- Fixing anime trailer’s if they’re broken, cause YouTube
- For me, easier way to deploy UI, API and data
Okay. That’s a more manageable list for my tired, dad brain. The first item works today, it’s just a semi-manual process. No worries there. The others, though, definitely can be improved.
I had already been re-factoring my data scraping scripts (honestly, the next part will go into more detail there cause it’s pretty cool). So I decided, that’s priority. My wife primarily uses my site to find where things are streaming, so better keep her happy and keep that stuff up to date.
That process is nearly complete. I think the logical next step is getting a script put together for deployment. No, I don’t use a pipeline. This is a statically generated site. All this time I’ve been manually FTP-ing files to my server. Don’t judge me. IT WORKS. Just annoying.
I could use a GitHub action and do a pipeline that way, but I’ll probably keep this local and just have a node script to push files to the server and/or database updates.
So I have a plan. I’ve broken things down into smaller, manageable chunks that isn’t “step 1: re-write everything”. I’m sure I’ll still procrastinate a bit, but I’ve already been making more progress with these small chunks.
Now I guess it’s weird that this series is called V6.. it’s more of improvements. Ah. Whatever. Maybe down the road I’ll get to finishing the re-write.
Thanks for reading about an old, washed up coder (me.. that’s me).