Noticed Something I Had Overlooked In My Templates

This morning while I was doing my morning routine of drinking my coffee. That routine is setting up the weather page for the current day. Sure, I could automate it, but it takes little time to do it by hand, and I’d have to edit the markdown file anyway to put in the summary.

I actually do glance at it, and today I glanced at it out of curiosity to see what yesterday’s rain total was. Normally I would have looked at the Ambient app, but I had this page open, so I scrolled down to look. I noticed that it had a big fat zero for yesterday’s rain total. That wasn’t right because it rained!

Off to the templates I went, looking for what I missed. At some point I had changed variable names when I was moving to tera2 and I had overlooked the YesterdaysRain one, and it was defaulting to 0.

It was a quick and easy fix and got my brain working a bit for the morning. I am grateful for the ability, and it’s a big reason why I do this site. I like solving problems, and I like doing so in a hobby setting, so it is not really a big deal.

Stuff like this would be unacceptable on a commercial site, yet it is. On at least two paid services I use, stuff has been broken for months. Accessibility for those is an afterthought at best.

Personally I find little bugs like this easier to spot after being away from the code for some time. When it’s fresh in my mind, my brain sees things as it thinks they should be. My best guess would be the fact that my brain fills in so much automatically to make up for my visual impairment.

Over the course of the summer there have been a handful of small things I had overlooked until they showed up. There were also things I knew were not quite right, but I put them on the back burner for a while.

Actually, there was something else I became aware of last evening: that was a misplaced { where it was generating JSON stuff. I hate JSON. It messes with my eyes. The symboles are look similar enough that I screw up the cound since my vision ally sees one small apart a time with the large text and all. Such is life, I guess.