My brain feels like it is going to implode.

I just spent a few hours today attempting to implement a Most Commented feature into the Badger Herald website (for my new readers who don’t know already, I work there as the web director).

And I failed.

When the former web director designed the website, he made the CSS so complicated and so unnecessarily complex that plain code being inserted into the website becomes so extravagantly formatted that it would drive anyone crazy and stop all levels of productivity.

If you are unable to see for yourself, the Badger Herald uses Disqus for commenting, and Disqus comes with widgets where I can stick in the provided code into our website and it’ll automatically fetch all the most commented articles from our website and put them in a list. The list contains the headline of the article in medium-sized text, and contains meta data with the number of comments and the date of publication in small-sized text.

When I put this on a random page on my website to test it out, it worked perfectly fine and the meta text was about 70% of the size of of the headline text.

When I transferred the exact same code onto the Badger Herald’s website, the size of the meta text became about 250% of the size of the headline text.

I opened up our .css file so I could figure out what was causing this to happen, and realized that the .css file is 34 kilobytes. I copied and pasted the content into a word processor and it ended up being 14 pages.

I gave up on it because I felt as if it would be a waste of my life reading through 14 pages of ridiculous code.

So if you ever end up working for me and have to program something under my management, and your project involves either me helping you or me programming in collaboration with you, don’t write stupid code like that.