Two ... er no ... three weeks in the mountains later.

The adventure continues in the mountains, and another two weeks have gone by. Many things have moved forward, some backwards. I'll tell you all about it.

First week of November, it's already been two weeks in the Sierras mountains.

Phone call.

The youth hostel in Córdoba calling our name.

"Yes, hello, we're calling because the QR code on the posters you put up is no longer working."

Problem: we have to make a round trip from our mountains to change all our posters.

So Anisah leaves for Buenos Aires, and I head for Córdoba Capital to change the signs on all the youth hostels.

This poster redirects travelers to a form on our website, so if it doesn't work anymore, it's of no use to us.

I have to confess that a bit of news has passed since I started writing this, simply because as I was writing these lines, the developer sent us the first version of the platform.

I'd never before had access to what's known as the backend, which is the view behind the website.

We start testing the platform, and find that the payment system we want doesn't work at all. Practitioners have to pay by credit card. And even though this is easy in many Western countries. Argentina is a rather exceptional country in terms of payment in South America. I refer you to my blog on money in Argentina https://juliensebire.fr/fr/largent-en-argentine/

So, for the platform we receive, well, it works for 5% of the practitioners we met, for all the others, it doesn't work.

And then, panic on board, what we received was useless. We expected to be able to test and launch, but in your dreams, guys.

Anisah's flying to Europe in 15 days, so the platform has to be finished before she leaves, except that this time we've received a piece of shit.

Except that for the first time, as I was saying, I have access to the backend. So I can see exactly how the platform works.

Seeing the dreck I'd received, I decided to make a copy of it and put it on another website of my own, so I could test out the proposed functionalities and see if I could do better.

The site is a WordPress*, which we asked for to start with, but which uses an extremely closed system with few possibilities for modification.

* WordPress is the world's most widely used system for generating websites. It is estimated that 80 % sites use this system.

I'd like to point out that we're in the mountains with a less-than-stellar Internet connection. It's enough to give online courses, but that's all.

 I'm starting to play around with the system and I'm realizing that the payment functionality we want with the current system is just not possible.

So we're going to have to start from scratch. The developer has been on the project for 4 months.

So never mind, I'll stop thinking and get down to work. I start again from 0, I try to recover the few recoverable bits of the website. Not much, and I start again.

I choose a well-known multi-dealer system, take the basic design that comes with the theme and off I go.

The first priority is to make sure I'm able to provide the payment functionality we need for the start. It won't be perfect, but for now, it'll do.

A few hours later, great, the theory I had in mind is working.

Come on, let's go for a complete overhaul of the product delivered to us by the developer. We've got visitors that weekend, but I've got no choice but to get on with it. Anisah and Flor are unfortunately unable to help me at the moment. But a dynamic is building up, I'm sitting in front of the computer for 18 hours a day developing the application, and I'm lucky enough to have two people looking after me. I eat in front of the computer, I sleep while the computer does something.

It's been two days, I've managed to recover a large part of the design, I have a basic functionality that works. It's ugly, I've got lots of extra stuff. But I've got something that's more or less functional. I have to make a backup every time I move forward. Except that, as I said, the Internet sucks, so my download crashes regularly. And I'm like a train driver, having to press "continue" every 3 minutes to get my download to restart.

So each save costs me a lot of time (beyond the debility of the task of pressing continue). And of course, when it's downloading, I can't do anything else.

End of the third day, great progress, but I have a display problem on something. 1h - 2h - 4h -- 8h later, I can't find a solution. Except that it's the display of all the products for the site, so if it doesn't work, the site is useless.

I've played around with CSS and PHP code (to put tags in the right places), but nothing works. It's impossible to get a correct display, and at this point I'm already in the depths of the Internet, but I can't find a solution.

I go to bed, I can't take it anymore. A few hours later in the morning, I manage to unlock something. Oh, great, it displays a little better. It's ugly, but at least it's legible.

I've been going for 2 hours and I can't find anything to go on. You know what, I'm going to make a backup anyway. 1 h 30 later. Backup complete.

So instead of getting back to the functionality, I implement the changes Anisah sent me. We change the text here, the colors there, the alignment of this object or that.

"Oh fuck! The site display has completely changed, everything is shifted to the right and I've made 1001 changes.

I'm trying to find the change I made, but it's the equivalent of looking for a needle in a bunch of times.

It sucks, I lost 5 hours of work, but fortunately I had a backup, so I can go back to it.

I reinstall the backup, except that the reinstallation doesn't go well at all. The site crashes completely.

So I redo a clean installation of the website. I reinstall the backup. And the display problems I had after my backup are still there.

"Pardon! What?! How is this possible?!"

Day 5, nothing works anymore. GENIAL!

I'm trying to completely change the design of the site, what we call a theme.

5th night, it's 1am, I get up in 3 hours to teach. And the website doesn't work at all. I feel like crying inside, but I'm patient. I send a message to the support team for the new theme I'd like to use, because I've got a problem with one of the basic extensions that won't install.

I'm going to bed because there's nothing I can do anyway. And off to sleep for two hours.

I take an hour's break, the students go to lunch, and I can get on with the project. It's 8 a.m. for me and I get a message from support telling me that they've done the necessary installation for me. And that it should work.

1pm end of classes, I'd like to go to sleep, but this moment of unblocking by support allows me to think about getting the site up and running.

Impossible to resist, I start a little and indeed, I can finally move forward.

The display of my products works exactly as I'd like, I just have to catch up on everything that was broken in the theme change and all the changes I lost with the new installation and I should be fine.

5 hours later, I still haven't slept, but I do have a decent, functional website.

I feel relieved, and I can sleep a little.

10pm I wake up and start tweaking some aspects of the site. There are a lot of complicated little things to change. 2am, we allow ourselves to look at a little something before going to sleep.

Tomorrow, we start the test phase for writing the documentation for practitioners to register on the site!

And now my backup is complete! I can continue.

Kisses