Blog Index
My computer's been out of commission for a while, and I only just got everything reinstalled. Even now it's not really up to its old standards, and there's a lot I'm still working out.
Imagine my surprise when I visited my blog and found it overrun by spam! Luckily, they only got one blog entry, and it wasn't that bad, all things considered. They seriously misjudged their target audience if they thought hawking viagra on gpi.com was going to get them anywhere!
Unfortunately, I did have to disable anonymous comments. It was easy to do (thanks to my foresight in design!), but I really would have preferred not to force people to register just to tell me what they think of my blog entries. The good news is that user accounts are totally secure, in terms of spammers being unable to get your email addresses. The only way to get 'em is to look directly at the database! So, you're all safe.
Have a happy New Year! :)
The Site
Computers
I'm beginning to think there might just be something to this idea of "user testing".
In the past 24 hours, I've had people very close to me complain about serious issues using the site. First was when I told Amy I'd given her picture posting access, and that it should show up in her menu. I asked her to hit Refresh under her User menu; she told me nothing happened. After a little back and forth, I eventually determined that she was hitting the refresh button on her browser instead. The reason was simple: she didn't realize those words on the top were drop-down menus! I assumed most users would expect to find menus at the top, where they're generally found in applications. But people just aren't used to that kind of functionality on the web. The item has since been renamed Update Privileges, a much more descriptive name than Refresh.
Then this morning I had an exchange with my brother about registering, which took place in the comments section for all to see. After I fixed the initial hiccough leftover from my transition to PHP 5, he told me the button didn't work. Eventually, I realized that he must have had some errors in his page, so of course the form wouldn't submit. Now, I still think the backend coding for the forms on my site are masterfully done. The transparent client-side/server-side error checking is a beautiful thing, and it's implemented quite elegantly. But it's all pretty worthless if the user doesn't know what's going on! To someone unaware that there's sophisticated error checking taking place behind the scenes, it just looks like the button doesn't work. I fixed this by adding an additional error message at the bottom when a form fails to complete, telling the user to check the rest of it.
The point is that I never would have thought of these problems just using it by myself. I'm just too familiar with the system. My access levels changed? Oh, I'd better hit Refresh under my User menu, because the menus are stored on a session object to reduce the load on the database. The form wouldn't submit? I must have made an error of some sort; I'd better scroll up to see what it is. These kinds of things are the most natural in the world to me, but to someone who didn't build the site from scratch they can be pretty obscure.
Granted, I don't yet have a solution for all the problems. The main problem with the User menu is that people don't know that's what it is: they don't expect it to drop down on mouseover. And I can't really add content telling people that's how it works, because the drop-down behaviour is presentation and can change at any time with a new stylesheet. But at least I'm aware the problems exist, and aware of their nature. That's a good start!
Before today, I really had no reason to check the site. Everything on it was put there by me. While that's still technically true, there's at least now the possibility for content from other people, in the form of blog comments. All you have to do is click on any blog entry and down at the bottom, the form awaits you.
In fact, I've even conquered a long-standing phobia of mine and allowed something new: anonymous comments! That's right, you don't need to register just to tell me what you think of the site. Anyone can enter their name and comment and leave their mark.
So, I invite you: tell me what you think of everything so far!
Humour
PersonalSo I got an email today from my dad. Short and to the point, he asked me to check out the webhosting service that he apparently signed up for. I was a little surprised that he went ahead without consulting his webgeek son (or his webgeek daughter, who lives in the same house), but I clicked the link anyway. The cheapest plan I found was $14.95 a month -- reasonable by itself, but I had a plan that set me back 8 bucks a month and gave tons more storage and bandwidth. Not to mention, I'd been with these guys for 2+ years, and I know for a fact they almost never go down. Knowing how tight money is for our family, I did what any reasonable and concerned young man would do.
I flew off the handle.
Firing off a hasty email, I questioned whether he knew exactly what he was doing. I used the title phrase, among others. I tried reaching him at work, I tried reaching him at home, and I got a hold of John. John didn't know much about it, but he did know that Matt had helped dad with the hosting.
Another piece of the puzzle.
After sending another, less flabbergasted email to my father, I did a little more research on the company. A quick once-over failed to yield info about specific people involved, but my subconscious was hard at work on the puzzle. I soon noticed that the name of the company had the first 3 letters of Matt's name, followed by the first 3 letters of his wife's. Coincidences were just piling up now... maybe.
So I realized that they probably had a pretty big part to play in the company, maybe even owning it. I realized they knew the dire financial straits of our family, and were probably willing to give a hand up. I realized that dad wasn't the kind of guy to pay first and ask questions later. Most importantly, I realized that in my haste to chastize I'd forgotten to trust my father.
There's a moral to the story. Never send off a hasty email without taking a breather first! It's a bit funny in retrospect, that I treated him so condescendingly when it was I who was playing the fool. But I'm not going to let the lesson pass me by. I mean, what am I, nuts?
The Site
I'm very glad to see the front page starting to take shape. It's been annoying having content on the site, with no indication of that on the front page! The date/time sorting works great, mixing of content types (pictures and blog entries) is running smoothly, and everything shows up as it should.
Still plenty left to do, though. For the blog entries, it links to a non-existant page. Easily remedied with a stand-in, but obnoxious for now. For the photos I need to fix the query to count from a day and a week back, discriminate based on which user uploaded the photos (admittedly a moot point for now), have it display the album name in the link, and set it to use the proper [link] code. For both of them I need to get some rudimentary markup processing in my Text class.
When the rudimentary markup is done, things will fall into place. I will be able to use bold, underline, and italics, among other things. I will also be able to link to relative and [link="http://www.brockcf.com/"]absolute[/link] URLs.
Here's to regular expressions!
Apparently I didn't get the query quite right. This caused all blog entries to be submitted with a null body! Hopefully that's fixed now... if you're reading this, then it is.
