I wrote a complicated and horrendously ugly scraping PHP script with hundreds of regexes to generate a PDF file from a CMS. It worked in about 90% of all articles, and for the rest only needing a few manual fixes in InDesign.
I always intended this as a stopgap measure till we implemented a clean document structure, of which both the web page and the PDF could be created. But that never happened. Then I left the company.
A few years later the company made a redesign of the website and totally scrapped the PDF feature.
However I still sometimes see these PDF pages out in the wild, mostly saved by the authors of the articles on their own web sites, because authors are allowed to link to their own content for free. It's a shame because I think these PDF versions of the articles were beautiful. But as you would say, technical debt killed the feature.
Another project for a NPO has been written in Python using an ancient back-end. When the shared hosting provider made an upgrade, the back-end died, and I was not able to repair it and I was not paid enough to invest too much time. I bluntly told the board that their project is as dead as a dodo, and they accepted that.
I wrote a complicated and horrendously ugly scraping PHP script with hundreds of regexes to generate a PDF file from a CMS. It worked in about 90% of all articles, and for the rest only needing a few manual fixes in InDesign.
I always intended this as a stopgap measure till we implemented a clean document structure, of which both the web page and the PDF could be created. But that never happened. Then I left the company.
A few years later the company made a redesign of the website and totally scrapped the PDF feature.
However I still sometimes see these PDF pages out in the wild, mostly saved by the authors of the articles on their own web sites, because authors are allowed to link to their own content for free. It's a shame because I think these PDF versions of the articles were beautiful. But as you would say, technical debt killed the feature.
Another project for a NPO has been written in Python using an ancient back-end. When the shared hosting provider made an upgrade, the back-end died, and I was not able to repair it and I was not paid enough to invest too much time. I bluntly told the board that their project is as dead as a dodo, and they accepted that.