Crazy to see you! Some time ago, I was actually looking to add Eksi to Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) since several users reached out and wanted to add it alongside their other platforms to share on their profile, but we couldn't find out the URL convention for user profile feeds! It seemed to be "https://eksisozluk1999.com/{{username}}--{{7 digit value}}", but we couldn't find any rhyme or reason to the 7 digits. Are the integers random, or do they even go back to stemming from a convention from the previous codebase?
User profiles are actually stored like https://eksisozluk1999.com/biri/{{username}}. "/@{{username}}" also redirects to "/biri/{{username}}". You shouldn't need numbers at all. The numbers are only at the end of topic titles. They are title id's (sequential integers assigned when they're created) to disambiguate conflicting Latinized forms of Turkish words.
back in 1999 or so, I wrote an online shopping site this way, all the data stored as text files (one per category, with many items in my case ... I was 18 years old and had no idea about databases). The site ran smoothly for almost a year until the customer used "*" in the name of a product... which was the character by which all the product data in the text files data was split...
live and learn. It was the re-split when they saved the new products through my brilliant parser that royally fucked it all up. Genius that I was, I used "|" to separate attributes, but I also definitely used a double asterisk to mean something else. Nothing teaches you not to get clever better than screaming customers and abject failure. And having to find/replace a thousand asterisks to figure out which ones were making the file unreadable. Falling on my face made me the careful coder I am today.
Early career chap over here. Awesome hearing stories like this. Those wild west days certainly have passed. We’ve got so much now to get us started as programmers that it almost robs us of learning experiences somehow.
Hah. Well you always need to just learn new things. That's what my life taught me.
Check it out. Year is 1999 or so - [edit: scram that, more like 2001] and I'm working at a Starbucks on my laptop. Mind you, wifi does not exist. Having a color laptop is sort of posh. One other person who shows up there every day, this kid Jon who's my same age, he's got a laptop. We end up talking. No one even has a cell phone.
Jon's my age and he's writing PHP scripts. So am I. I have a client I built a website for that needs an online store - they sell custom baby blankets and car seat covers. They want a store where you can choose your interior fabric and exterior fabric for each item, and see a preview. They have 10 interior and 20 exterior fabrics. They sew these blankets by hand for each request, for like $100 each. This is a huge job at the time... it pays something like $4000 for me to write the store from scratch. (I'd easily charge $60,000 now for it). First I have to mock up 200 combinations in photoshop?... so instead I write a script that previews the exterior and interior fabrics. Then I write a back-end in PHP to let them upload each fabric and combine them.
One day I'm sitting at the next table to Jon (he was working on a game at the time, I think - fuck, who knows, we were both 18 year old drop outs) - and I showed him how I wrote these fabric combinations to text files. And he was like... "Dude, have you tried SQL? It's AMAZING!" And I was like, "what the fuck is SQL?"
Yes, people used to pay idiots like us to build their websites. I'm still sort of proud of a lot of shit I got to do back then. But I am thankful to Jon that he introduced me to SQL when I was at the time trying to invent databases from scratch with fopen('r') and fopen('w') and hand-built parsers ;)
[edit] Just one little thing I'd note my friend: If you have a brain, it's always the wild west. Those jobs that make you create something from scratch, they haven't evaporated. Sure, it helps to know newer technologies, but the more important thing is being sure you can do what they're asking for, and then figure out a way to do it. This is the hacker ethos.
