Friday 22nd May
Yesterday I didn't do an exceptional amount of work for all the time invested in it. Things started with a lot of little tweaks to the look and feel of the site, mainly with regards to Internet Explorer. I then moved on to working with the Thriftway Travel's RSS feed. With the way we use flutter to provide the majority of our site content, the only data being provided by the feed was the Deal Title and the date posted. I adjusted it to work provide the important details on the destination as well as the description.
After this David Dawson made a visit to the placement. We spent a while chatting about how things had been and went over some of the specifics on the write-up I have to produce for next week.
After this I spent a the rest of my time working on little bits and pieces to help finish up minor details of the Thriftway Travel Site, such as the Favourite Icon which will also be used for the logo on their Twitter Profile.
That's about it for this week. I've also got Will and Mukesh working on aspects of my write-up in the form of feedback forms that I need them to fill out.
Posted by Wulf on May 23, 2009, 9:37 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Wednesday 20th May
So today was horiffically slow. Better than yesterday by a long shot. Internet was still iffy today, so we switched to the "backup" internet we apparently have. This let us actually work on things, though it did have the side effect of taking our mail server offline.
My work today consisted primarily of procrastination, or that's how it felt. I did work on some Icons for the Thriftway site, and set up a Twitter account for the company as well. We've not done anything with it yet though. I also provided access to the Thriftway RSS feed so that people can be alerted to the latest deals as and when they are posted. I'm hoping to be able to enhance the feed by making use of some of the aspects of the flutter components we use throughout the rest of the site.
Finally I also brought the single pages more in line with the look of the rest of the site.
In other news I managed to work on an aspect of my site today for my new Admin Panel, the comments section. I uploaded it and got it running smoothly only to discover that I had approximately 900 spam comments on my site all made over the last 4 days. That wasn't a fun lunch break at all.
Posted by Wulf on May 20, 2009, 7:31 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Spam tastic...
So I finally found some time, during my lunch break, to work on another bit of my new admin panel. It revealed something quite horrifying to me, in that I had approximately 900 items of spam spread throughout my blog. I've purged it all and set my comments to require authorisation, at least until I come up with a better anti-spam filter.
Edit: I've tentatively re-enabled comments showing by default once again. I've implemented a few basic measures to hopefully eliminate the spam, at least from the public.
Posted by Wulf on May 20, 2009, 2:08 pm with 2 comments - Permalink
Monday 18th and Tuesday 19th May
Yesterday I spent the day working on the Thriftway Site, changing the look of the front page to match fully with the new design of the site. I also was alerted to a bug on the site by a customer who phoned in. Whilst I'm disappointed that I didn't spot it myself, I'm glad that it was pointed out and resolved.
Today was spent breaking the website. How? Well today our internet connection went all screwy... whilst I was uploading files to the server. I'm not sure on the specifics of it, but there was data loss from several important files for the site, rendering it useless. I managed to get it semi-functional over a period of 5 and a half hours. I had nothing else I could be doing. The frustrating part is that even then it wasn't running fully. Within five minutes of being home though, it was all sorted out.
Posted by Wulf on May 19, 2009, 8:06 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Thursday May 14th
I was off placement sick yesterday, so I found myself with some more deals to add to the Thriftway Site. I've now got quite a few holiday destinations to find attractive photos for. I fired through those pretty quickly, having gotten the process pretty well memorised these day. Doesn't help with the quality of information, as I've no tourist destination knowledge, but it gets them up there.
Other than this I spent a lot of the day working on the site, tweaking some aspects slightly and overhauling some aspects of the site a great deal. The majority of the work was undertaken on the Thriftway Travel Home Page, to bring it in line with the rest of the site. This involved adding the blue bars to the top of most sections, which helped highlight the Flight Search.
I was also able to rework the front page rotator to be a lot smarter than it had been previously. Beforehand it would always attempt to rotate the deals, which looked rather pathetic if there was only one deal on there. It was also odd to have the previous and next buttons there in such a case. Now, courtesy of an increased knowledge of the Wordpress coding, I was able to adapt it so that these features were only enabled whilst there was more than one deal to display. If there is only one, then they don't display and it has always been set up to disappear from the page in the event that there are no posts to display.
On the topic of better understanding the Wordpress coding, I have finally worked out where the code is that allows me to remove certain categories from the list of deals people can access. This might make people wonder "why?" but it is for a very simple reason. I have the flash banner on the site set up to make use of a Wordpress Category. This allows people to easily add or remove deals from the flash rotator. These posts lack the content of actual deals, but were still accessible. This has now been changed.
Tomorrow will probably consist of me finding images for the deals currently on the site and wondering why the heck I'm finding it so difficult to stay alert/conscious for a full working day. I find myself almost totally drained of energy from about 4:30pm.
Posted by Wulf on May 14, 2009, 7:12 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
