Well it was inevitable, I had to preemptively get a hourly job to cover my bills. So that means things are going to slow down on my site development. I'm still trying to get the swing of my work schedule down, hopefully I will be a bit more in tune this week. It looks like I've got a couple hours in the morning to get some work done, if I have no other errands to get done in that time. Hopefully this will just encourage me to work faster, optimistically giving my overall abilities a performance boost! Well here's to hoping.
Fixed the login box, mostly spacing and attached it to the actual bottom bar instead of having it attached to the top and moving it down there. Also fixed the part of the login JS methods, mostly cause I already had it built just had to tweak it a bit. Aside from that I tweaked the coloring of some of the buttons on top so that it's more clear which ones are disabled or "coming soon" instead of just having a dead link floating around up there.
Well I had a bug in the daily first that took me a bit to workout. After trying several tests on it I finally started typing in random thoughts until it bugged again and realized it only bugged when I had apostrophes in the text. I guess I was just more awake this time, so I put in preventive measures by running a check before hand and adding slashes when needed. I also put in checks for begin white spaces, to prevent a blank entry from being put in. While testing I also noticed that leaving word wrap on would make the DF output display cleaner so threw that in too. I removed the login from the main menu and placed it at the bottom of the page, since there was room down there and it felt crammed in at the top. Also put labels into the login text boxes that are removed when information is typed in.
Well that took me three days longer then I wanted. Two days I didn't have enough time because I had to keep running down to my dad's place of business to try and help figure out what was wrong with his digitizer and had to drop off some applications at various stores for a job...any job. And today I was just out of it so it took me longer I wanted. Anyways, I think I got the Daily First completed now(aside from a couple of extra safe guards I will put in later). The first person each day can post whatever they want and it will be a part of the site. For the most part I will let whatever people post stay up. I also set it up so that it displays how many characters you have left to type for the post and stops typing from going over that number. I don't want to be the first one to post on it, cause that doesn't seem fair. Hopefully their won't be any issues on the live site and it works like on the test site. Oh yeah, I also had an issue because I was using an out-of-date DateTime object in PHP. That was a pain in the butt. On the plus side it is a good thing I found out about that, because I wasn't even taking my PHP version into account while writing any of this and I've come to find out that my webserver is using an older version then I am. Good stuff to know!
Almost done setting up The Daily First section on the main page. Built to main structure for it and have it displaying on the page correctly. Now just have to finish wiring up the button and a couple checks so users can anonymously post to the page. Also think I'm going to setup a secondary page like the updates one so that there will be a history of what has been "firsted". Should be able to finish it up tomorrow.
Started putting together the login fields. At first I'm only going to have it setup for an admin login, until I get a couple more things done. Also started laying out "The Daily First" section on the front page, just some random idea I thought I would put up when I was trying to think of things to actually have on the site.
Replaced the CSS hover command on the table highlighting with JavaScript. Works better and is compatible with internet explorer. Also messed around a little with Gimp and just made a quick patterned background, not sure if I want to keep it or not just wanted a little more behind the site. The complete black background just looked a little off.
Added in the updates page, which will give a full list of the site updates. Also, broke up the CSS files trying to keep a specific style sheet for each page. I figure why load a CSS file if the user isn't even going to the page. I mean it will probably be a trivial amount of information, so we'll see how it goes. Also created an extra CSS for the updates page mostly just allows the description to stretch out and adds a hover that increases the text size. Thinking about replacing this with Javascript so it doesn't matter what part of the table row the mouse is on, also I just checked and IE doesn't like the CSS hover unless it's a link so it doesn't even work in there.
After stopping at a friend's house and seeing the compatibility issues from Chrome to Opera to Firefox I decided to remove the animated drop down main menu and replace it with a stagnant one. I think the most I'm going to have are the button hover effects, until someone actually comes up with a standard for CSS3 and follows it. I'm leaving rounded corners in since it doesn't really matter if the browser can support them or not. Also resized the width of the page to make it a little more user friendly to the majority of people. Last but not least I added a bottom icon bar to show the things that I use and built the site on.
Finished transferring and setting up site to SuperGreen. Exported database, uploaded pages, fixed a couple of pathing errors, and tweaked the connection information. Looks like everything is working so far, just hoping that SuperGreen has all the stuff I'm looking for in a hosting site. I'm always concerned that when I make some kind of large change that I'll over look something. Here's crossing my fingers!
Finished the short update display on the main page to list the 5 latest updates. Adjusted the basic styles too and wrote them down because the color scheme was clashing really bad and I kept forgetting what colors I was using. So going to try to use less colors and stick to a standard.
Added in the dbconnection stuff and built a class to handle the retrieval and display of the update information...actually going to need to set this class up so that it can do two different retrievals. The short one for the main frame and then the extended one for the update page.
Redesigned the main menu and applied a style format to it to have it drop down and do rollovers. Pretty sure I want it like this so that it is out of the users way when not needed. Using CSS3, so doesn't work at all in the current IE version but I'm not even going to worry about that until the site is actually up and getting traffic.
Well this is the third reincarnation of my website. I'm hoping I can keep enough going on it for it to become the one that sticks to the internet. Just need to keep thinking up things to do, add to, or improve on and I should be able to keep it going. This also serves as a note to the visitors, there might be random things up on the site as I make various attempts to expand the site and keep my interest going.