Monday, May 7th, 2007
Slowly completing my other projects now, been doing the crazy sudoku one now 😀 It wasn’t too hard to implement I must say, though I did use the dirtiest coding ever to build it, nonetheless I completed the juice of the system and all I need is to finish bits and bobs off, write the report and bam, another project out of the way. I’m suppose to be making posters right now so its pretty awesome that I’m way ahead of time. Got lots of presentations and demonstrations to do this week. Including some crazy poster presentation and a database presentation. Will most likely need to look representable so ties all the way (leather one to make it slightly rock and roll haha). Watching loads of Studio Ghibli films lately, felt really inspired to watch them again 🙂 Still wanna goto Studio Ghibli in Japan 🙁
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Saturday, April 28th, 2007
After months and months of coding I’ve finally managed to get Musecast.co.uk to launch. The site is pretty intense after we started putting in real content into the site. I’ve already received some feedback on the site and I’ve started up google analytics on the site to track the outcome.
Pre launching the site was quite a painful experience, it included some MORE bug fixes (this time, loads more popped up!) as well as some quick features added onto the thing (such as a navigation bar for news and podcast so you can move to the next and previous podcast / news so news searching is easier). The tags in particular seems to work really well. It does provide an easier way of organising and finding information based on keywords.
After all the bug fixes I had to export the database and import it into my client’s hosting server. After that, a few site configurations and the site was up and ready. I’m quite proud at the overall outcome of the product. Theres quite alot of features which greatly increases the chance of a user reading more pages within the site, theres also a great potential of using digg, reddit and delicious to further increase the exposure of the site to potential visitors.
Now we play the waiting game (not really, I need to write the project now haha).
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Saturday, April 28th, 2007
Tonight was a final bug hunt before launching the site, I’ve asked several internal staff members and fellow programmers to test the site for me for bugs as well as design criticisms. Tonight I went through about 10-20 bugs spotted and fixed them one by one, some include:
- The nav bar, I’ve increased the size of the header again so that theres a gap between the nav links (in particular their hover top border) and the subtitle of the site. My client wanted this fixed in particular so it was good that I managed to get that done
- Feeds, the way they are parsed and added onto the news page. They were being escaped when double speech marks were used, a fix was to use the htmlspecialchars() function and then strip slashes on the form. The process was a bit tedious in pinpointing how to correctly parse the thing
- Logging in system, made it work more smoothly now,it will now take you back to the original page you were on
- Logging in system, I’ve also ensured that admin pages are not accessible unless you’re logged in AND you are an admin, I will also do some htaccess on this folder just for added protection
- Include more bookmarking sites on the summary pages
- Fixed the links on the meta box
- Sorted the headlinks, turned them to pink instead of white (since white was the main font so it made sense that way)
- Delete news, that works now. Twas a few typos in the code
- Fixed the comment approval section, was suppose to display “no comments required approving” but it didnt, was a problem with the query, fixed now though
That should be about it for the bug fixes, tommorow I will refresh the database so the id numbers are all nice and new and after that we’ll be able to enjoy a nice site launch. Hopefully.
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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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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
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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.
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Sunday, January 28th, 2007
Managed to really tidy up the admin panel, in particular the Podcast manager section. I’ve tried to keep the amount of links and functions to a minimum and have the rest hidden via css and javascript. Below shows the songs and tag section doing just that. I’ve also added navigation on the top of the page so users can go back to the main page via the top, and the links on the side as well
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