Thursday, August 17, 2006
Story Pages
As the number of stories increases it becomes more important to improve navigation, I have also endevoured to work on the archive structure which should make finding your way around the stories a somewhat more enjoyable experience. As part of this process I have increased the amount of meta data available on story pages as seen below, I have also made a common left bar for all the story pages of whichever template. I will be working on a view counter and also emailable story links aswell as del.icio.us and digg buttons which will hopefully improve the usability and shareability of the stories.
http://www.jaeproject.org.uk/story.php?piece=62&template=5&title=Tonic%20Tees
http://www.jaeproject.org.uk/story.php?piece=62&template=5&title=Tonic%20Tees
Add links
You can now add links again from the connect website, link delete and edit are not online yet.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Mail Verification
I have noticed that the take up for verification is extremely low on users who signed a piece of paper at an event or with a Jae Team Member. I can understand this as verification is really unnecessary as Team members can be trusted and users have already been effectively verified in person. As such I will remove the need for verification on these users, it will remain necessary for people who sign up online. I believe the take up will be higher as they will have begun a transaction online and received instructions on screen which tell them that they must verify their information. These users have not undergone any sort of face to face verification and hence the danger of spam is greater. As such I believe it is still important to require verification in order to receive the newsletter.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Working on Validation
I decided to spend half an hour this morning cleaning up code, specifically HTML and CSS, I ran the home page through the WC3 Validator http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.jaeproject.org.uk and cleaned up a couple of minor issues, I didn't delve further into the site purely because of lack of time but was glad to clear up two minor issues, both will propogate accross the site as the issues where related to an advert and the newsletter signup.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Working on Validation
I decided to spend half an hour this morning cleaning up code, specifically HTML and CSS, I ran the home page through the WC3 Validator http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.jaeproject.org.uk and cleaned up a couple of minor issues, I didn't delve further into the site purely because of lack of time but was glad to clear up two minor issues, both will propogate accross the site as the issues where related to an advert and the newsletter signup.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
Mail Verification
I have noticed that the take up for verification is extremely low on users who signed a piece of paper at an event or with a Jae Team Member. I can understand this as verification is really unnecessary as Team members can be trusted and users have already been effectively verified in person. As such I will remove the need for verification on these users, it will remain necessary for people who sign up online. I believe the take up will be higher as they will have begun a transaction online and received instructions on screen which tell them that they must verify their information. These users have not undergone any sort of face to face verification and hence the danger of spam is greater. As such I believe it is still important to require verification in order to receive the newsletter.
Working on Validation
I decided to spend half an hour this morning cleaning up code, specifically HTML and CSS, I ran the home page through the WC3 Validator http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.jaeproject.org.uk and cleaned up a couple of minor issues, I didn't delve further into the site purely because of lack of time but was glad to clear up two minor issues, both will propogate accross the site as the issues where related to an advert and the newsletter signup.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
As far as PHP code goes it is still rather messy, being my first major PHP project there are a great many things which I would like to have done differently but as has been said before 99% of all old code is embarassing 5 minutes after you have written it! Things seem to be running ok though, I have been slowly building capacity, and attempting to standardise a lot of the functionality using objects, this is going to become very important as realeyez comes into play. As well as a proposed project to manage relationships with schools which perhaps needs some funding.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Google for Your Domain
I applied for an account at www.google.com/hosted a long time ago with little hope of actually getting one, well what do you know, it came through and I have subsequently transfered our email over to GFYD. All in all it is infinately better, if for nothing else the spam filter works a treat which is saving me (and I presume other staff) hours a week in sifting through unwanted and often offensive email.
The calendar function is also a great addition and the tight intergration between mail, calendar and maps is brilliant. I have allready created shared calendars for staff and events which once in use can be easily syndicated. I would also like to syndicate emails to the Jae Connect site, as you can into netvibes or google ig for normal gmail.
The calendar function is also a great addition and the tight intergration between mail, calendar and maps is brilliant. I have allready created shared calendars for staff and events which once in use can be easily syndicated. I would also like to syndicate emails to the Jae Connect site, as you can into netvibes or google ig for normal gmail.
RSS
RSS feeds are finally available so you can syndicate our content to your website or news reader. Please use this service with respect. I have also added add to buttons for google, yahoo and netvibes to make it a little easier.
I created the xml feed here: www.jaeproject.org.uk/feed/
I had to make the header send an xml content type because otherwise feedreaders won't recognise the php file even though inside is reasonably well formated xml. I used the php Header function to do this. Other than that it is an extremely simple RSS feed based on the specifications.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/rss_primer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
Feed Validator was extremely usefull in creating the feed, and making sure it broadly validates. There are still some bugs in the xml but they don't seem to cause the feed to crash in most feedreaders, so they take a somewhat lesser place on my list of priorities though I will get round to fixing them soon.
I created the xml feed here: www.jaeproject.org.uk/feed/
I had to make the header send an xml content type because otherwise feedreaders won't recognise the php file even though inside is reasonably well formated xml. I used the php Header function to do this. Other than that it is an extremely simple RSS feed based on the specifications.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/rss_primer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
Feed Validator was extremely usefull in creating the feed, and making sure it broadly validates. There are still some bugs in the xml but they don't seem to cause the feed to crash in most feedreaders, so they take a somewhat lesser place on my list of priorities though I will get round to fixing them soon.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Templates
Sorry it has been some time since I posted, that doesn't mean I have been doing nothing though! I have improved the long news template (5) the picture now appears on the right hand side which makes the flow of text look a lot more natrual more of the time. This is great because it is very difficult to get the guys to write the right length shorts for their story. This way a shorter or longer first paragraph doesn't impact as much on the look of the page.
I have also written a script to detect whether the Photo is landscape or portrait and then display it in proportions accordingly. Hopefully this will lead to less stretching, in time i will eliminate it entirely.
So much to do so little time.
I have also written a script to detect whether the Photo is landscape or portrait and then display it in proportions accordingly. Hopefully this will lead to less stretching, in time i will eliminate it entirely.
So much to do so little time.
WYSIWIG
I have added the FCKeditor to the story form, this is a WYSIWIG editor which will help users to add basic formatting to their stories. There are some glitches to do with embeding video (eg. from youtube) but that wasn't in the grasp of Joe Blogs users anyway so I am happy with it. Hopefully with this it makes it that little bit easier to create nice looking stories online and hence adds value. Thanks to the folks at FCKeditor for a great OS product.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
People Class
So I have finnished this round of work on the people class, the sign up is back online and doesn't seem to be recieving any damage from spammers or injection attacks. Everyone who signs up at the moment is added to the waiting room to await verification, at present all our members are signed up for a mailing list of some description so all need verification in line with our anti spam policy which I have mentioned earlier. Anyway at a later stage you will be able to sign up straight into the main database and there will be extra verification needed to perform certain operations or recieve certain things, like mass emails.
