Monday April 20th
The plan of attack for today was to get the look of the site shifted over from the original design Will had produced over to the newer design that he has since developed for the Individual Deals and the Categories page. I mentioned this previously, providing a mockup in my April 15th blog post.
I did manage to start the work on this, modifying the overall design of the site to allow for the implementation of the actual switch. I'm a bit hesitant of how the new look has impacted the front page, and may adapt it to allow the first column to be slightly larger. You can see before and after shots by clicking here (before) and here (after).
I also managed to start rolling out the new design of the single posts, to the cruises section. You can see the before and after of those here (cruise before) and here (cruise after).
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take things any further than this as I was soon tasked with adding new content to the site. Whilst it's important that deals are contantly updated, the site is currently a mix of different layouts, and looks rather horrible for it.
Posted by Wulf on April 20, 2009, 7:43 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Friday April 17th
I spent Friday working on the code behind the new Category and Single Post pages. As yet I haven't managed to get it into the site. I also got to test Thriftway's online search/booking system. It works well though I did encounter a problem. Upon trying to book a low-cost flight, in this case with Easyjet, the credit card we were using failed to autheticate. Not exactly that great when it comes to customer satisfaction.
This resulted in me spending what felt like an hour on the phone with the company TelMe, who manage the flight search/booking system that we use. The person I spoke with was most useful, and between the pair of us we managed to identify that the bug did not affect the majority of the bookings system, but was a fault somewhere in the low-cost bookings, and could have simply been that the card was declined or temporarily blocked for some reason. The person I was dealing with said he'd look into the issue and get back to us.
Posted by Wulf on April 20, 2009, 9:48 am with 0 comments - Permalink
Using the last.fm API
A friend of mine, Will McNeilly, over at glasgowpodcart mentioned to me that he was looking for some way to pull data from their site using their API. In particular he was interested in pulling out events related to specific groups and artists. After looking over the last.fm API I decided to give it a go, using the artist.getevents method, which generates an XML feed. From that it was a simple case of parsing the XML into a site using, in this case, the simpleXML function in PHP5. The code looks something like this:
<?php
$s=simplexml_load_file('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=artist.getevents&artist=Disturbed&api_key=b25b959554ed76058ac220b7b2e0a026');
foreach ($s->events->event as $event) {
echo 'Event Title: '.$event->title."<br/>\n";
foreach ($s->events->event->artists->artist as $artist) {
echo 'Performing Artist: '.$artist."<br/>\n";
}
echo 'Venue Name: '.$event->venue->name."<br/>\n";
echo 'Venue City: '.$event->venue->location->city."<br/>\n";
echo 'More Information: <a href="'.$event->url.'" target="_blank">'.$event->url."</a><br/>\n";
}
?>
What this code does is pulls the XML feed into the page listing the latest events for the band Disturbed, and pulls various aspects out of the feed and displays them in a very rough and ready form. I've left it like this so that Will can slot it into the glasgowpodcart site and theme it however he sees fit.
View Result: Disturbed's Upcoming Events
Posted by Wulf on April 17, 2009, 7:43 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Homage to my Tribalwars bretheren
I have, for a long time now, played a browser based game called Tribalwars. One of the features of the game is, for premium users anyway, that you can create a customised toolbar. to provide increased functionality within the game. For a long time I, and many others, made use of a set of icons hosted by a player of the game. Unfortunately, sometime within the last 24 hours, these icons were removed.
To this end, I have quickly fired together a new set of icons for people to use. All of them are based off of TW Original Artwork, modified and placed onto a button design I threw together. It's not as comprehensive as the previous set that we had available to us, but it's a start. In addition to this I am also making the original Photoshop PSD file available in a download that includes all the icons I have created, so that people can host their own versions of the icons should they so wish, but also so that people can create their own icons to supplement this pack. Link to view the icons and download are below:
Edit: I just added another 15 icons into the pack.
View: TW Icons List
Download: TW Icons List.zip
Posted by Wulf on April 15, 2009, 10:41 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
(Yet Another) New Site Design
Another, and hopefully final, site design up and running on the site. It's been quite a learning curve to design and produce my own Portfolio Site and has given me plenty of opportunity to learn new things, several of which from my own mistakes.
This new version marks an improvement in usability within my site. Some aspects of the old design were rather set in stone, whilst this new version is much more flexible and scaleable in it's design and function. Which will be nice if ever I decide to add new areas to the site.
Posted by Wulf on April 15, 2009, 10:31 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
