Posts Tagged ‘uni’
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
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.
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Category anything | Tags: Tags: code, uni, websites,
Social Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Posterous.
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
Managed to publish and compile a survey for Musecast, pinpointing certain problems of the site.
Friday, February 2nd, 2007
Agenda
- Meetings, pre pick some time to avoid constant need for booking. I should ensure that they are attended regularly
- Demonstrate wireframes
- Check feasibility (i.e is it hitting the right buttons)
- Demonstrate current progress
- Perhaps set up a launch date for beta product (with the basic features available, improve through feedback).
Any other business:
Action/Targets:
- Redo wireframes, really think about usability and customer journeys when doing it, make sure everything has a purpose.
- Until this is done, coding should only be in blocks so it is easy to move the information from one place to another.
- I’ve been suggested to buy a book by 37signals, which talks about how to design sites with more thought to it
Next Meeting:
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Though having set a few targets to complete for Thursday. I’ve contacted my client to ask if he could do a test on a few pages (mainly the podcast / tags / songs page) to see if he is comfortable with what it does and how the interface looks. As well as my client, I will also ask a few of my friends to do some ongoing tests on the first few pages. Hopefully the next timebox will include the RSS functionality which is probably the meat of the system.
As testing is ongoing, the feedback should be concise. So I’ve suggested that my client uses the following questions to structure his feedback on:
- What parts of the system did you like
- What parts of the system did you not like
- What would you like to improve on the system
Very simple questions but it can form some guidelines on how I will make it change on the next iteration.
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
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
Monday, January 29th, 2007
One of the site’s features is a tag and song “tagcloud” used to show which tags are popular and which aren’t. The idea is simply, for tags that are popular, you emphasise them more, this can be done in terms of font weight, size, colour and whatever styling method that enables the text to be highlighted from another text.
Right now I’m only using the font size as a way of demonstrating the tag cloud but perhaps if theres time I could go about doing it for font colour too (which might need a bit of configuring to ensure it works).
I’ve managed to stumble upon this article which helped me out on how I should establish the correct distribution of font sizes etc so I’ll be using it for making the tag cloud.
http://semanticvoid.com/blog/2006/01/06/tag-cloud-font-distribution-algorithm/
The article is pretty small but does the job
Ever thought of how the collection of tags with varying fontsizes (known as Tag Cloud) populated. As I say ‘theres an algorithm for everything’, theres an algorithm for this too. Assuming you know all about tag popularity (if not refer previous post) I’ll go ahead explaining it.
The distinct feature of tag clouds are the different groups of font sizes. Now the number of such groups desired depends entirely upon the developer. Usually having six such size-groups proves optimal.
Assume any suitable metric for measuring popularity (for instance ‘number of users using the tag’). We can always obtain the max and min numbers for the same. For example:
max(Popularity) = 130
min(Popularity) = 35
Therefore we can define one block of font-size as :
( max(Popularity) - min(Popularity) ) / 6
For the above values we get one such block range as (130 – 35) / 6 = 15.83 ~ 16
Font-sizes therefore could be bound as follows:
Range Font-Size
35 to 51 1
52 to 68 2
69 to 85 3
86 to 102 4
103 to 119 5
120 to 136 6
Update
Tonight I managed to create the tag cloud. Not only that, I turned it into a function so that it can be used for more then just the admin pages. The coding was pretty much based on the above calculations to come up with the right sizes, I used percentages to portray the font sizes as it seems more relative to the web page.
Thursday, January 11th, 2007
God it’s stressful when uni stuff starts lingering around. Yesterday I managed to hand in my ISS assignment, was a pretty painful process. Everything was quite rushed and there was still room for improvement. I spent the night before working till 4.30 making sure that as much information was on the report.
The worst bit was making sure I woke up at 9:30 to be head to uni and hand in everything. It was pretty painful but I guess we managed to complete it in the end. So yeah, that was a pretty painful experience. You’d think after that I’d be able to get some rest and just recover, but nope. I had to do my revision for ecommerce afterwards. Though there isnt much to revise for the exam, I had to produce a case study for the exam.
I managed to complete that at a disturbingly late time (5:30 this time) and was even more scared I’d miss the exam and fail the entire module (and course).
Luckily the sleep was good and I DID get to wake up early (woo!)
So yeah. it was a 2 hour exam
Half of the paper was multiple choice questions (40 marks), then the other half was short answers (50 marks) haha.
Notice the word short.
For the mcq, I managed to finish that quick like a cat. Had a really quick look back at the answers to make sure I definitely got them right.
Then with the short questions, i went ALL out haha! first question (20
marks) i used 5 pages to answer it all… kinda got stuck with 30
minutes to go doing the last two (both 15 marks each)
so yeah.. ill most likely get the best marks on the first one, and shabby marks on the other two because i was in such a rush.
occasionally i would just stop to yawn and shake my body off since i was still wrecked from last night. So yeah.
Sunday, December 10th, 2006
I have marked your PID and given you an overall grade of B+ (14+31+17) and the following comments
- Good start but needs more on goals and outcomes for the project
- I might focus the project on making recommendations to redesign the site to aid promotion
- I would certainly make the emphasis more of the “Musecast as Case Study” approach we discussed
- I would like to see proof that you are using “The Perpetual Beta” approach you discuss
- Glad you are blogging – I am reading
- Your catalogue of technical influences is very broad and I remain unconvinced that you will need all of them
- Your project plan seems to be mainly a list of what a plan is – avoid this sort of boilerplating.
- The risks section is particularly standard (and therefore unhelpful)
This is certainly not a bad PID but I want to see more real progress on the project.
Jonathan
Very pleased with my initial PID grade, will definitely need to start focusing on ensuring that the site is in a state that is ready for public as soon as possible to ensure I can use the Perpetual Beta approach on the public.