Website Restoration

September 1, 2016

Context

Towards the end of my freshman year of high school I was asked by my brother if I could make a website. As someone with experience in web development I said yes. Since my brother was the school (student) president he knew many teachers, and it turns out one asked if he knew anyone that could build a site. I eventually met this teacher and he asked if I could transfer an old “Apple built” site to a more easily maintainable system. Even though it was a transfer job rather than a development job I still agreed, he handed me a flash drive filled with assets and I went on my way. When I got around to looking through the flash drive I noticed it was a bunch of XML files with weird encoding, and some image files I couldn’t view. I met with the teacher again, and he admitted that the website was for a friend who only gave him those files. The teacher and his friend promised to pay for the transfer so I thought how hard could it be to fix the files. Little did I know It’d take an entire summer, and only make $150 off it.

Corrupted Files

From what I could tell the files were corrupted: the XML files had indiscernible encoding, and the images would not open in any picture viewer/editor. From my Minecraft days I knew programs like WinRar were capable of doing encoding stuff so I figured it was a good place to start. Doing a bit more research I learned people actually fixed files using file archives. After following some tutorials, I managed to recover some images and make the XML files “legible.” I spent some more time trying to recover everything, but I eventually settled for what I had. I didn’t care too much for the messed up image files, but the slight encoding issues with the XML files was a killer. My plan was to basically use a program to read the XML files and spit out a text file with its contents. My issue though was the slight encoding errors. Despite the files looking the part of XML, the incorrect character here and there still made programs unable to read it properly. Ultimately, it seemed like I had to manually transcribe (copy/paste) the text into Weebly from the XML files. With the amount of text, and encoding fluff, it took a while… a long while.

Reflection

I managed to complete the website in a summer, but for the effort I feel I was “a bit” slighted with the payment. That stuff aside though, I’m still appreciative of the experience. I learned to be more careful when picking up a job. I also managed to pick up some lessons in file corruption. And arguably a greater silver lining is that there seem to be people that appreciate the new website (see the guestbook page on the site). All in all I don’t regret taking the job, but maybe I should of just communicated better.

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