crazybobbles

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).

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.

Seems like my prototype site is almost ready for launch. Quite alot of new features have been implemented including:

• Better integration with social networking sites (includes Digg it/Delicious/Reddit buttons, and more profile pages)
• Pagination for news and podcast articles
• Fixing and including some new sideboxes (including Top Songs/Top Tags/Current Show)
• Voting on podcasts
• Allow images on news items, integrated onto articles more nicely
• Loads of fixes on site, including the comments section

The report is doing strangely well. I’m at about 57 pages and 14,000 odd words. Still got evaluation and conclusion to do. Hopefully that will mainly be content only as well as reflections to the site.

Need to review with Supervisors as well as book a time to demonstrate site. I will hopefully get the site migrating and working live before demonstration.

Pretty much completed both sections now.

The Analysis section includes the following:

• Data Flow Diagram
• Customer Journeys
• Web Report Anaylsis
• Online Surveys
• Requirements Catalogue

Whilst the Design includes the following:

• Hardware software used
• Logical Data Structure
• Storyboarding
• Wireframes

I might be keep my design section a bit low but I might need to check on whether thats appropriate. Implementation is where its at as I have developed quite alot of features for the website and have alot to write about for it.

Perhaps one of the most significant change in musecast is the new navigation menu. It both increases the space for content and decreases the unnecessary space used to accommodate the sidebar. This was one of the biggest steps in terms of site designing and will hopefully be a good step since we can use the extra space to implement more content based stuff.