derivativ

I put a lot of work into this last session in order to fully flesh out the design and bugs of the site. There were a great deal of icons that needed to be completed and put together for the site, including the new rating, flagging and favorite systems on the site. I also had to create the updated icons for the ‘home’ buttons. I created these icons as well as the different states that that would be needed on the site. I compiled the list of them that can be viewed here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/final_assets_may.png

I spent about 5 hours on these Icons.

I also spent four more hours writing a draft of the presentation script that we will be saying for senior show. Not all of it made the final cut, but a good deal I would say. Since Leigh posted the final script, I won’t post my draft to be redundant.

I am currently working on the PowerPoint of the website. I have spent about 4 hours on it already by making the art assets for it and preparing several designs to get our message across properly and neatly. (According to Presentation Zen) I will post it upon completion.

Other than that when I had a moment I have been debugging the site with my fellow team members, writing new stories and contributing to existing stories. I put about 6 more hours into that this week.

This week did more exploring of the site as well as helped prepare for the presentation for Tuesday.

So far the site has much improved from what it has looked like before, am satisfied with some of the bugs that I noticed have been repaired. Looking forward to Tuesday, spent about 3 hours on the project.

This week I wrote the speech we’ll give with the Powerpoint at our presentation. It took about 3 hours including collaborating with the rest of the group for their input. I also continued to advertise Derivativ to my friends and family. It’s looking really good, isn’t it?

I plan on writing more content for the site by Tuesday.

I spent a huge amount of time working on the site this week - won’t go in to specifics with times, but I spent a full 40 hours banging on the thing over the whole week.

A lot of the time was spent applying a good deal of Ajax-based interactive features. You can see this reflected the most obviously on the story page - the only time you’ll ever actually “load” this page is when you’re viewing a completely new story (as opposed to contributions). Everything loads and refreshes with ajax. It’s pretty smooth.

There’s a good amount of ajax on the profile sub-pages as well.

Besides the AJAX, I worked mainly on general improvements to the way the site looked. There’s a lot that goes into the site - and a lot to keep consistent across the multiple pages we have. Having 3 people working directly on the code of the site lead to a good amount of disparity in graphics and the terms we use. I brought everything to use a unified style.

The site is in very good shape, I think. The work that the team put into it over the last few days really polished it. I’m confident for our presentation Tuesday.

here’s the general breakdown of the features list:

1 = implemented
.5 = structure set up but not complete
0 = not complete yet
X = features no longer being worked on primarily

half-implemented stuff we promised:

0 - Story Joining
.5 - Story rating
1 - friending
1 - friends list section somewhere?
X - uploading images
X - placing images into stories
1 - approving testimonials before they display
1 - delete unwanted testimonials
1 - working editor for profile settings, as well as general user settings
0 - overall score generation for authors based on contribution popularity
1 - sending messages to other users
1 - user inbox page
.5 - friend updates when friends write stories or contributions
1 - reformatted browse page
1 - reformatted search page
.5 - ability to browse through more than returned entries for:
_____ 1. search results
_____ 0. lists of user stories
_____ 0. lists of user contributions
_____ 1. features authors
_____ 1. features stories
1 - full ‘features’ page for authors and stories

Aaron and I did a lot of work trying to knock out this list, and I plan to have it completed by Tuesday. I have a lot of faith in the completion of the website. Pavel did a really nice job on a tooltip in the story page, and got us set up for story rating. It’s my understanding that the others got us started on the PowerPoint. We plan to meet early before out meeting on Tuesday to work on the presentation, as well as our regular team meeting on Thursday.

- Derivativ

i put a good 35 hours in trying to knock out as much of the list of remaining elements as possible. Between Aaron and I we almost got them all.

I worked on the following:
- general site fixes (especially on the profile edit, which should be working well now)
- sending messages from the profile page

- friending: when a user first decides to friend another user, an approved entry is made in the DB, and a friend message is sent to the friend user. When that user logs in, they get the message in their inbox, and they have the option to approve or ignore the request. This updates the DB.

- gave the user the functionality to approve or deny testimonials written by other users

- rebuilt a new search page from the structure used for the browse page. give the user many more options for advanced/specific searching

- creating a favoriting system for stories: when a user views a story they haven’t favorited, they see a big star icon at the top of the page. Upon clicking it, an entry is made in the DB that the user has favorited that entry. They can then go and access that point from the list of favorites in their profile. This also allows them to browse others’ favorites.

Pavel and I had a run in on the site earlier this evening, and in the interim, a number of files got rolled back to earlier versions… For ungodly reasons I spent about a good 5 hours just sitting here fixing broken stuff and then I updated the beta site with the new version of the site. I’m going to be working strait through the turn-in today just trying to complete the rest of our features list. I hope to complete it by our meeting. We mean to spend next week mostly making sure everything works properly and fixing stylesheets while we focus more effort toward the presentation with the others.

- Christian

This week I took care of creating the Inbox for messages, adding items to the “Home” page - the landing page when you’re logged in - and pages dealing with the friends that you’ve added.

The inbox took a while to figure out, but it’s working nicely now. We wanted to have a way to indicate whether or not a message was “read” or “unread”. We’re using a different color background for each. This sounds simple enough, but since our rounded divs need to be individually “rounded” by script, the two different display styles on “unread” and “read” required me to invent a new method of initilizing the script to round the corners. I spent about 4 hours on this.

The other things used a lot of repurposed code from other parts of the site, so the work was less thoughtful and more procedural. Still, though, there’s a lot of bits and pieces to each part; it takes a while to get something fully working right.

Something I couldn’t fully get operating is a way to cross-reference a number of different database tables to generate a list of items rencently posted by your friends.

For these last things, I spent 4 hours.

Next week is the big week, and I’ve taken some days off of work in order to dedicate a full day to work. We’ll need some of the time, but I think we’re in a good position to get things delivered in very good shape.

This week, I just did a little exploring on the site on and off each day, adding and contributing a story or two. So far the only story that I can tell that has gotten anywhere is the poem that leigh put up. I found a couple of errors that I just noticed were all sorted out. I agree it is troublesome to find errors during the week when the programmers are eking them out by the time our ppjs are posted.
I’ve also managed to finally get one friend to actually put a story in who was not from DIGM (so far as I know, she hasn’t added anything since).
And finally I just started putting together the presentation. Will be talking to the rest of the group about what we will say and such. I worked on the project for about 4 hours.

This week I started the script and Powerpoint for the final presentation. It took about 3.5 hours. I also added content to Derivativ. Overall I worked ~4.5 hours this week.

When I do try to work on debugging the site, the coding team is usually working. This means I run into a lot of parse errors that keep me from viewing the page. I wanted to take screenshots of the site for the PPT, but have been encountering these errors. Tomorrow I think the site will be easier to access and I plan to finish the PPT at that time.

I noticed a very interesting glitch this afternoon when I was adding a branch to this story. If you are just reading the first branch, the date is 5/09/09. If you click on the branch that I had just made, the date of the second branch turns to 12/31/1969, so not only did it go back in time, but it shows something is broken on the site as well

This week I worked on debugging the site mostly. I have created a new updated debug log that has the newest entries. Put several hours on it throughout the week.

The link is here:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/debug log-1.txt

The Facebook group is a solid 98 members. I don’t think it has changed much since last week, and I sure hope that they have all been to the site and at least checked it out to see what it is all about. I received a troubling statement the other day from my friend’s girlfriend upon entering the site. She said that she couldn’t figure it out and she didn’t know what the purpose was for. I guess it’s not such a big deal, because she didn’t read any of the text that explained the site, or even went to the site to check it out. She just looked at the pictures and didn’t click any of the links. I suppose it frustrates me more than anything to know that she isn’t the only one doing this…

I have been advertising via word of mouth.

I also spent some time writing stories and contributing to existing stories and branches that exist in hopes of creating large story threads come the senior show, and faculty presentation. Took me less than an hour or so and was very fun

http://derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=112

http://derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=116

http://derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=118

http://derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=119

I also created the icons for the main toolbar when the user is logged in. These took about three hours and were really fun to make. I am pretty happy with them; I’ll have to see what the group thinks:

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/write_icon.png

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/represent_icon.png

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/read_icon_01.png

Finally, I am working on a PowerPoint presentation for the faculty presentation, we just have a week left, and it’s about time to really start fleshing it out for the show. So far it is just the basic design of the PowerPoint; the content will be filled in for the week’s meeting. I am also going to collaborate with Leigh on it, to make it the best PowerPoint presentation of all time. I am not going to bother posting it to create multiple versions and confuse the other members. I have put 2 hours into it so far, and I think I should spend my efforts in writing a solid speech for the presentation. It will be professional, stylish, funny, and sexy: the Frankie Gambino way.