crazybobbles

Slowly completing my other projects now, been doing the crazy sudoku one now It wasn’t too hard to implement I must say, though I did use the dirtiest coding ever to build it, nonetheless I completed the juice of the system and all I need is to finish bits and bobs off, write the report and bam, another project out of the way. I’m suppose to be making posters right now so its pretty awesome that I’m way ahead of time. Got lots of presentations and demonstrations to do this week. Including some crazy poster presentation and a database presentation. Will most likely need to look representable so ties all the way (leather one to make it slightly rock and roll haha). Watching loads of Studio Ghibli films lately, felt really inspired to watch them again Still wanna goto Studio Ghibli in Japan

After months and months of coding I’ve finally managed to get Musecast.co.uk to launch. The site is pretty intense after we started putting in real content into the site. I’ve already received some feedback on the site and I’ve started up google analytics on the site to track the outcome.

Pre launching the site was quite a painful experience, it included some MORE bug fixes (this time, loads more popped up!) as well as some quick features added onto the thing (such as a navigation bar for news and podcast so you can move to the next and previous podcast / news so news searching is easier). The tags in particular seems to work really well. It does provide an easier way of organising and finding information based on keywords.

After all the bug fixes I had to export the database and import it into my client’s hosting server. After that, a few site configurations and the site was up and ready. I’m quite proud at the overall outcome of the product. Theres quite alot of features which greatly increases the chance of a user reading more pages within the site, theres also a great potential of using digg, reddit and delicious to further increase the exposure of the site to potential visitors.

Now we play the waiting game (not really, I need to write the project now haha).

Tonight was a final bug hunt before launching the site, I’ve asked several internal staff members and fellow programmers to test the site for me for bugs as well as design criticisms. Tonight I went through about 10-20 bugs spotted and fixed them one by one, some include:

• The nav bar, I’ve increased the size of the header again so that theres a gap between the nav links (in particular their hover top border) and the subtitle of the site. My client wanted this fixed in particular so it was good that I managed to get that done
• Feeds, the way they are parsed and added onto the news page. They were being escaped when double speech marks were used, a fix was to use the htmlspecialchars() function and then strip slashes on the form. The process was a bit tedious in pinpointing how to correctly parse the thing
• Logging in system, made it work more smoothly now,it will now take you back to the original page you were on
• Logging in system, I’ve also ensured that admin pages are not accessible unless you’re logged in AND you are an admin, I will also do some htaccess on this folder just for added protection
• Include more bookmarking sites on the summary pages
• Fixed the links on the meta box
• Sorted the headlinks, turned them to pink instead of white (since white was the main font so it made sense that way)
• Delete news, that works now. Twas a few typos in the code
• Fixed the comment approval section, was suppose to display “no comments required approving” but it didnt, was a problem with the query, fixed now though

That should be about it for the bug fixes, tommorow I will refresh the database so the id numbers are all nice and new and after that we’ll be able to enjoy a nice site launch. Hopefully.

Features are being churned out everyday for the past 2 weeks. I’ve been able to:

• Redesign the side so that the navagation menu is at the top rather then at the side to save space.
• Implement tag and song boxes, sort out their admin sections
• Implement comments for news, this includes editing, deleting and adding
• Implement a comments page which enables an admin to approve comments that have been made
• Introduce side boxes; just simple blocks that contain things such as tags for the news, meta data for the site, comments that require moderating, user login and logout
• Implement a user logging in and out system.

I’m going to focus alot more on adding things such as digg, delicious and other social networking integrations. I’ll also be focusing more on my report.

Right now I’m focusing mainly on finishing the podcast admin page, the page is similar to the news page, and finishing this means that I’ll be able to complete the main requirements of the site (ie the administrator can easily create, update, edit and delete records for both podcast and news). I’ll be targeting to complete this on Thursday evening. Afterwards its essential that I focus on the RSS section since I have the least knowledge about that section.

The following requirements needs to be done by Thursday:

• Sorting columns
• Pagination
• Code cleaning

Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ve done the main functionality of the site, include tag clouds, toggle switches and general editing, creating and modifying of the data. Just needs the finishing touches