Feature Complete

I am sure everyone was eagerly waiting for news about the website project, and I guess I have some.

The site is fully functional. I actually had all the major pieces working at the end of last week, and spent my project time over the past week applying the style elements to make it look like an actual website instead of just a test project.

Just for reference, this was the log in screen a week ago:

It does everything a log in screen needs to do, but it certainly doesn’t look fancy. The log in screen wasn’t complex but it’s an easy example. Here is what it looks like today:

There is a lot more I could do, just in the area of the appearance, but I am working with a deadline of roughly “have it working by June” so I am trying not to get too lost in the weeds polishing up the parts that don’t have to be there in release 1.

Speaking of things that still need to get done, here is the project board as of a few hours ago:

 

As you can see there is a lot left in the “To Do” column, and I can promise some of it isn’t ever going to get done, but having it all listed out at least lets me apply some form of priority when I look for the next thing to knock out.

I should say a little about Trello. It’s meant to be an approximation of the sticky notes on a dry erase board that are so popular when planning projects (software or otherwise). Most of the coolness of the system doesn’t come into play when I am the only person using the board, but I still have found it to be somewhat helpful.

We use a product on my current project at work that provides far more features, none of which do we actually use. And the features come at a cost both in money and in a clunky interface. I keep have been pushing to use this instead, but there is a lot of attachment to the idea that we will someday use all the extra features (and I suppose the fact that we are already paying for the current solution). Anyway if you are looking for a way to organize a few people and a few dozen tasks, Trello might be something to play with.

going back to the website, my next task is to get my actual hosting setup such that I can deploy  a Django app there. Also I just realized I don’t have any tasks on the board for that… but I know what they are 😉

With any luck you will all be able to read this post, meaning I haven’t managed to break wordpress or any other major component of the existing website!

-Jordan

More Website News

So… I discovered Monday that my nifty little HTML5 solution to doing a slideshow on the front page had one minor problem.

It doesn’t work on Internet Explorer 7 and older. Then I started watching the logs and quite a few page views were coming in showing MS:IE7 making me feel kind of guilty for having gone live with that.

For good or for bad, I don’t have a great way to test older browsers when I am not at work… so the fix I just deployed may not work as well as I think it should…. Assuming it works though there is at least a static image while I try to pound out an AJAX solution with more legacy support.

-Jordan

The Front Page Is Live!

As previously mentioned, we have a new front page!

Note: I the following while waiting on sign-off on the image set being used. What I didn’t know at the time was that the slide show has a nasty image load delay related hiccup, and that my “just drop in files” slide show plan only works if the image is exactly 800 / 600 px. Other than that though, WHOOHOO IT’S LIVE 🙂

Initially I was planning to build the look from scratch, but I quickly realized that things like picking colors are not my strong suit. Also I wanted to get onto poking at some sort of scripting so I fell back to the go-to “hack up a free template” option I have used in the past. I am pretty happy with the resulting look.

As for the scripting, you may be thinking “it’s just a slide show, I have seen those before.”  Yes, I am sure you have, but I built this one from scratch! It only has one transition, and I think I may be causing the javascript engine to work a little harder than other implementations do. On the other hand, I can just dump images into a folder on the server and they will instantly be included in the slideshow.

My initial plan for the slide show was going to be some sort of AJAX + JQuery thing, but directly drawing to the canvas sounded more interesting. The downside I suppose is that this probably doesn’t work at all on IE6.

The end result though, is that we have a new front page, it isn’t as ugly as the one I did last year, and because it features pictures Heather is about 500% happier with it than the old one.

 

-Jordan

Development Note

Putting the finishing touches on the front page overhaul, and felt like I needed to make this explicit:

When you are looking for javascript documentation, Google is often going to point you to w3Schools or any number of other almost useful sites. I think those sites must put more energy into being ranked in Google than having useful information.

The place you should go, and I mean the only place, is the Mozilla Developer Network. I wish I had figured that out months ago, but at least I finally have a good reference for the javascript api (and they call out things like best-practices too!).

Anyway, I think things will be ready to push live later today, so that’s pretty exciting! **crosses fingers**

-Jordan

Changes!

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had worked on cloning the existing front page, and supporting pages, to an archive area.

Today I finally sat down and put together a new main page.

It isn’t anything fancy really, but I am kind of proud of it considering I coded it up from scratch.

The old wedding page was a free template I hacked up to meet our needs. Not to say that there is anything wrong with hacking up templates and tutorials, but I still wanted to force myself to approach the new site like a programmer. I didn’t use any canned code, and I didn’t use any graphical tools, just Eclipse and an FTP client.

Heather thinks it needs a picture of us on it…. expect some changes down the road I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Website Work!

I think I mentioned quite a while back that I was hoping to get a chance to revamp the main heatherandjordan.com site.

I have finally completed step one of that process by setting up an archive of the site in its current state. Not the most exciting thing ever, but I wanted to preserve the old wedding site. Anyone wanting to look is free to check it out here, but I should warn you that, unless something is broken, it will look exactly like the main site. I guess if you find a broken page let me know… I know the RSVP page is a little goofy, but I didn’t want to bother re-writing the php right now.

Sadly that was the easy part, as now I have to figure out what to replace the wedding pages with on the homepage. Hopefully I can come up with something soon.

-Jordan

Website Thoughts

I am setting here, watching it snow again. I think it’s time to re-vamp the website here.

I will move the current wedding site off to some sort of archive area, so it can still be viewed. I just haven’t figured out what to do with the base domain.

My most recent project was a website for friends of ours Casey and Carson.

That site was basically just massaging WordPress, using a theme somebody else put together and just tweaking it. I would like to do something more ambitious for my site. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

I am also really tempted to change the robots.txt settings so that google can index the blog. Not that I really desire more traffic, it just seems silly to hide from search engines.

-Jordan

Mid week website update!

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

Website TODO

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

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