Mid week website update!

Posted on by Jordan

Managed to find some time last night to make some quick edits to the website.

  • Every reference to the reception now says “Johnny Cascone’s Italian Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas” instead of just “Cascone’s in Kansas City”
  • Filled out the lodging page, that should be done now.
  • changed the RSVP page to request number of guests, and hopefully be clearer
  • changed the PHP script that sends the RSVP info so the message is easier to understand.

My proofreader and picture captioning expert was way too sleepy to do much by the time that was all done, so the pictures still lack captions.

At this point I am just happy that my enthusiasm hasn’t dropped off… I was afraid it would be painful to keep tweaking things at this point, but I still enjoy getting things going.

-Jordan

The website, and eight pounds of chicken.

Posted on by Jordan

First off, lets see how I did on that list yesterday:

  1. Update the groomsmen pictures.
  2. Try defaulting the directions page “from” box to null.
  3. Fix the formatting problem on the directions page.
  4. Split the directions page into 2 pages so we have directions to the reception in KC.
  5. Add text to the front page talking about the KC reception.
  6. Add a “home” link to the gallery.
  7. Fix the width of the text boxes on the RSVP page for FireFox.
  8. Add a “special thanks” page?
  9. Replace the default 404 page.
  10. Setup the accommodations page, assuming that information is available.
  11. Captions instead of file names showing in the gallery.
  12. Look at adding extra text to the black space in the gallery.

Gallery is kind of a maze to figure out how its building pages, I think I have found where it constructs the main page you see when you click the “gallery” link from the front page, I just have to find a way to inject a link back to the main page from there. I am not optimistic about adding text in the unused space, but maybe I will change my mind once I understand its page creation code a little better.

the other things on that list I simply ran out of time for, perhaps because I was being lazy and didn’t get started right away 🙂

I also tackled the frozen chicken I had piling up, for over a month now I had been buying a bag or so each time the store had a sale on frozen chicken breasts. Ever since Heather and I started our workout plan I have been using the approach Heather used, where you cook a bunch of chicken, and freeze it in proper meal sized portions. Buying lots of it raw, and then procrastinating before cooking it meant I had four bags, or eight pounds of chicken to deal with. I normally use a vinegar and pepper marinade, but I didn’t have a big enough container to soak that much chicken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that much in the same style. So after trimming it all, I settled on four different kinds:

starting at the top, and going left-to-right, we have: BBQ, lemon pepper, plain, vinegar-pepper. I was pretty happy with the results. the BBQ didn’t come out as well as it has in the past, but I think I did something differently then, I just cant remember what. After cubing and bagging all of that I ended up with 22 bags of chicken, enough to keep me in quick lunches for quite a while 🙂

Hopefully today I can knock out the rest of the website stuff, and maybe even get my room cleaned a little bit before I completely loose this productive streak I am on 🙂

-Jordan

Website TODO

Posted on by Jordan

With Heather gone this weekend its a good time to make a final push to wrap up the website. I figure if I publish my to do list here I will feel obligated to stay on it and maybe overcome the Saturday-afternoon lethargy that sometimes kills these projects. 🙂

things that still need done:

  1. Update the groomsmen pictures.
  2. Try defaulting the directions page “from” box to null.
  3. Fix the formatting problem on the directions page.
  4. Split the directions page into 2 pages so we have directions to the reception in KC.
  5. Add text to the front page talking about the KC reception.
  6. Add a “home” link to the gallery.
  7. Fix the width of the text boxes on the RSVP page for FireFox.
  8. Add a “special thanks” page?
  9. Replace the default 404 page.
  10. Setup the accommodations page, assuming that information is available.
  11. Captions instead of file names showing in the gallery.
  12. Look at adding extra text to the black space in the gallery.

The sad thing is I am sure there is a fair amount I can’t remember right now, but the list as it stands should give me something to shoot for at least.

-Jordan

Broken

Posted on by Jordan

Hi, so it seems something is broken on the blog if your using Internet Explorer. I think its related to the last Moab post, but I can’t seem to find a broken tag…

I will keep looking, in the meantime, try Firefox, or the Chrome Beta is fun too!

I should also point out that the rest of the wedding site looks a little better in Firefox than IE, for some reason IE is lazy about properly following the CSS being used, leaving things not-quite lined up.

**** update 3 minutes later… found the offending tag… IE still makes me sad

-Jordan

Comments

Posted on by Jordan

I was somewhat caught off guard by actual comments here, so I dug through the wordpress settings and made it a lot easier to post comments. We will also see how well the anti-spam plugin works, but then again I think for now this site is safely below everyone’s radar, meaning the spambots shouldn’t be a problem 🙂

also, I really want to build one of these: Ruben’s Tube

-Jordan

Me:1 Google Maps API: 0

Posted on by Jordan

This might be more honestly considered the rematch, after things did not go so well for me Saturday, but I have a fully-functional map on the directions page now! I am not too impressed with the documentation in the google maps API, they give you some helpful example code, but don’t explain what anything dose. When I took the time to go through it line-by-line I realized what was going on, but good grief I write more descriptive comments into code that nobody will ever see at work than they did into their public *EXAMPLE* code </grumble>

I am really excited to have that in, it means one more thing off the list, and a somewhat more involved task than the ones before it. I will ask you to kindly ignore the allignment mess at the bottom of the directions page, and refrain from pointing out that all I did was copy-paste some code into a CSS template while I bask in this accomplishment.

next up: the RSVP page, aka “lets point out how little Jordan knows about PHP”

-Jordan

The website is… progressing

Posted on by Jordan

Things are moving along with the website! After almost all day Saturday, half of Sunday, and an hour before work today, I can almost call the front page, and the bridesmaids pages done. Once the last few formatting issues on the bridesmaids page get sorted out I can have the groomsmen page done in minutes, excluding my lack of good pictures for the guys. Heather had lots of good pictures of her girls, nether I nor facebook really has good imagery for the guys… hopefully I can track something down soon.

then I just have to figure out how the whole registration thing will work, beat the google maps API into my CSS format, and… yeah that should about do it for the website! 🙂

-Jordan

Gallery, Verbage, Colors etc

Posted on by Jordan

I have managed to pull Heather into the design process for the main website (woot), and now have some actually challenges instead of just saying “meh, looks good enough.” Its a good thing, and I think the website is going to look awesome if I can implement everything we talked about.

First off I wont have to try and come up with text for the front page that doesn’t sound dumb, Heather can do that! 🙂

Second off, once we pick colors, pictures and whatnot, I will have to figure out CSS wrangling to get things to be the right colors, and formatted around pictures. I don’t expect that to be so hard, but who knows.

lastly, trying to get Gallery to pretend to be a cohesive part of the website is kinda a pain, using the proper theme, it at least presents the pictures in a non-painful way. Heather asked that the background be black, and low and behold, the “slider” theme has an option for a “black” color scheme… only its not black. Should be easy enough to fix, I just need time to dig around in the color settings. Then I run into the fact that “slider” doesn’t leave me an easy place to inject a link back to “home”, nor dose it seem to care that I don’t want the picture file names displayed.

I am looking forward to Saturday though, I should have some time to beat on the website

-Jordan

Website

Posted on by Jordan

CSS templates are amazing fyi! The front page looks halfway professional, and it’s not because I know what I am doing when it comes to web design.

It may change a lot, but I am rather encouraged by the progress I made in the last 12 hours or so… I think the wedding site may actually come off pretty well!

-Jordan