derivativ

This week I implemented the star rating and cluetip on the test site. This took some messing around with html and a little bit of php, which I’m just starting to learn.

http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=273
(you can actually go to any story page on the test site and see this, I’m using this link just as an example)

The rating isn’t tied into the mySQL database yet, because I don’t know how to do that, I’ll get together with either Christian or Aaron this week and make it work. There isn’t that much left, its just (as I said before) I don’t know how to tie it in with the database.

The cluetip tooltips appear when you hover over “Started May 02, 2009 by [username]” and should display their avatar, profile info and friend/send message links. I couldn’t figure out how to actually call them from the database, it always gives me and error that the function (for displaying avatar or profile info) doesn’t exist, so all you see now is text placeholders. I’ll have to seek help on this from either Aaron or Christian again.

The star rating and cluetip took about 8 hours to do.
I also made a new story and a contribution on the site, that took like 1/2 an hour.

Next week I’ll be helping with whatever else there is left to make the site functional.

This week I’ve created some more js.

I couldn’t get qtip to work so I found cluetip. However, it doesn’t look as fancy and rounded corners are only possible with images:
http://test.derivativ.net/pavel/tooltips.html

Rating:
http://test.derivativ.net/pavel/story.html
Here’s a tutorial I found for integrating it with php and ajax for whoever is putting it all together:
http://www.yvoschaap.com/index.php/weblog/css_star_rater_ajax_version/

I also found a fix for the bug that doesn’t display rounded corners in story pages in IE. In story.css scroll all the way down and change width of #showComments to 875px. This took a lot of trial and error to figure out.

All in all I’ve spent about 3 hours trying to resuscitate qtip, 3 hours implementing cluetip, 1 hour on the rating thing and 2 hours trying to debug the rounded corner in IE problem (9 hours total).

Week 5 complete… essentially 2 weeks left.
There’s a lot of work left to do, but it’s getting complete steadily. We’ve got our list of to-do’s and everyone’s on task.

Still left to work on:
Many of these are halfway there and simply need to be tied up and finalized.

- Story Joining Algorithm
- Story Rating Algorithm
- Friending
- Approving testimonials before they display
- Delete testimonials
- Overall score generation for authors based on contribution popularity calculation
- Sending messages to other users
- User inbox page
- Friend updates when friends write stories or contributions
- Reformatted search page
- Ability to browse through more than returned entries for:
1. search results
2. lists of user contributions
3. features authors
4. features stories

This week was spent mainly working on the Browse page.

You can see it here, even if you’re logged out:

http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=browse

It was a bit of a pain to code — it’s got to keep track of all of the form values for it to be truly functional, which meant a lot of checks made to make sure that all links and form submits retained the user’s input.

It’s good to have done, though. The browse page up until this point was nearly useless; unimplemented. Now it’s all there. I knocked it all out today, spending 6 hours on it.

I also updated Christian’s profile settings page to be more human-friendly, with some descriptive text and general sprucing up. Took about an hour. You can see this if you’re logged in: http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=profile&s=editProfPage

I also did some miscellaneous fixes and updates around the site this week. Things like small spelling, capitalization, minor styling issues like padding and margin weirdness, etc.. It’s a little tough to reconcile how much work I put in here - it was all done in little spurts as I saw things needing to be fixed, but I’d say I spent about 2 hours on it over the course of the week.

First off this week I worked on the profanity filter after reading diego’s story that says a ladybug lives on a giant “fuck”. The code was disabled so the profanity did not return as “rainbow”. Creative…

Id post the link, but I cant find his profile because the search does not work still.

About 2 hours of coding went into the filter. It is almost complete. I should finish it Monday.

Because of some new designs, We have a few more icons I can design for. Ive toyed around with a few ideas, but nothing is polished enough yet for submission. I will have the new icons complete by the end of the week.

A couple hours went to the icon designs, but nothing much

I spent the a good amout of time throughout the week on the site itself looking for errors and mistakes, and trying to break it’s code. It has been intresting and I have found a bunch of problems that the site has born.

Since there are too many links to post the bug checks that I did, I will just post some very important ones

Broken with large story:

http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=287

This link shows us that the css and all other coding on the site can be broken if the styory entry is too long and unmanageable. In fact the story does not have a cap for how long it can be so this can very well happen to our site all of the time. The other big thing I will note is text art. Ascii art is a form of imagery that can definitely be used on our site without anything we can do besides a flagging system. Due to the formatting of the posts as of now however, a claear image cannot be created. If the formatting is fixed and this would be able to shoe properly, we can have a slight problem on our hands, especially if the images get pornographic or offensive.

text art formatting Link:

http://test.derivativ.net/index.php?p=story&s=290

I logged all of my findings of the debug log that I have posted on the project path website.

http://www.jervo.com/basecamp/digitalmedia2009/sp2009/debug%20log.txt

I put about 5 hours of debugging this week on the site.

By ther way, I made sure to post the amount of time I put in this week.

Other than that, I have been talking with some users trying to find out what they like and do not like about the site. I have also been advertising the site to others, and keeping a close eye on the facebook group I made last week we are now up to 95 members.

Next week I will finish the new icons, profanity coding, advertise, as well as any new art assets that come up and whatever the team needs me for

This week, I spent a considerable amount of time trying out the test site and creating a list that I found while exploring the site.

I also sent a flyer out to Glen so that he could inform members from the English department letting them know that we were beta testing.

I also finalized the song, fixing things up so that it can be played for Senior Show.

Overall I spent seven to nine hours on the project.
Brandon’s errors list
Derivativ Flyer
BlackWall feat. Souls of Mischief — Derivativ is the Place

This week I spent 4 hours testing the site - then parse errors started coming up everywhere and testing was cut short.  Revision list here.

Also racked my brain for useful people to test the site.  Most notably I contacted the webmaster for the gaming website PlanetDA.net who will hopefully put up one of Frankie’s banner ads.  I asked a creative writing class at Temple to test the site.

Ah, I was also advised to put up screenshots of the forum posts I made last week:
Kingship of East
Earthmother Protectorate

Overall, I spent six hours on the project this week.

I put in another good 20 hours of work this week. I finally got to a ton of little fixes I’d been meaning to for a long time. I compiled a bunch of feedback we got from the face-book page, the walls on the BETA site, and from some of the testing our team and other people had done this week and earlier.

- still more formatting fixes (almost there)
- brand new more inviting registration page
- log-in error feedback, and redirect to full login-page.
- registration error/success feedback
- edit profile error / success feedback
- added links the the user profile when you click their name in the ‘recent items’ list.
- added links to more information in the logged out ‘big box’
- I made some new colorful buttons for the 3 major links on the logged-in user page
- full working edit profile section

A majority of my time was spent on this edit profile interface. First of all, it just wasn’t working at all before, so I overhauled it. We moved the edit profile page into a new tab inside the user profile. This makes sense as it has do do more with the user profile than anything else, and it also keeps the links under the user drop-down more unified. I then made all the various links to the settings page, and redirects point to this new location. Next I had to completely re-write the script that ran to check the information. I implemented a check for each field this time. First it checks to make sure you entered an old password, and that it indeed matches the user password in the DB: this is required to edit any settings. Next, it checks each field, if you entered information it adds it to a list, and if you didn’t it adds your standing information to the list. Then this list is re-entered into the DB as your user information.

This new system also starts to implement a one-field full-name slot for the DB and the site. We still need to add this change to some other pages, but it doesn’t effect too much. Right now it keeps the first names that were in the DB, but users will have to re-add their last name if they had one registered (which most of them did not anyway)

- setting / storing birthday information
- started to implemented user name
- full-name paradigm (production begun)
- character limit for branches implemented
- logged out trespassing feedback “you need to be logged in to do that”
- automatic flagging for mature content based on profanity search

how this works now is that instead of replacing profanity, I wrote a function which searches each posts every time you write one or view one (a double safety) and if any of the words are found in the post, it automatically changes that posts rating to mature. The team agreed this would be a better way to go about it.

- implemented blurb creation whenever a story or branch is mode.
- other users only see your testimonials you approve (production begun)

I started to build functionality for this last item: first I made an ‘approved’ field in the DB. Next I made it so that whenever you go to a user profile you can only see the testimonials they have approved. If you’ve written a testimonial on somebody else’s wall it shows up dimmed until it is approved. Also, whenever you write on your own wall, it automatically gets approved. I started to make boxes and approve buttons for non-approved posts on your own profile, but I didn’t get to all the functionality there just yet.

I think instead of relying on Aaron to help me with the rest of the Ajax that needs to get done for this function, and especial the rest of the functionality for commenting and story combining, I’m going to need to sit down and wrap my head around it myself. We have too much work in the next 2 weeks for any work being held up. It shouldn’t be difficult, I’ve just been cautious about how much work I do on the JS side, since Aaron had a lot of the architecture set up. This week I’ve also started to take a look at that.

Next week I hope with this new knowledge I can get the user In-box set up (if for nothing else, sending notifications to users about branches being written to their stories, and testimonials). This coupled with the functionality to delete unimproved posts marks a major remaining void in the functionality we’ve promised for week 8 and I pledge now to have them done this week ASAP.

If we get the others started now on the remaining pages that need to be built for the other items on the list, we should be in good shape to have them hooked up by me next week.

- Christian

This week I was assigned to continue the marketing work. I have posted 20 flyers around campus and have begun communicating with my past English professors about the site so that they can inform their students. I also added a story start to the site, and will be adding more in the coming days.

In total I spent about 3 hours on this project.

3 weeks left…

My work this week started early on, for the release of the “beta” stage of the site. The biggest improvement was the addition of the AJAX-loaded contribution view on the right side of any story that has contributions to view. This took about 3 hours to implement, which was a lot less than I thought it would. The jQuery AJAX methods are very, very nice.

http://test.derivativ.net/index.php

If you’re not logged in, you can see the first change I worked on this week: The header bar is now visible to people who are not logged in, and shows some contextual content based on that.

Once you do log in, you’ll get to the meat of my work this week: The home page. This was somethat we really needed, I think, to serve as a hub for users to know exactly where they can go to hit big, fat, easy buttons to do the three main user-dependent functions of the site: profile editing, creating stories, and reading (and thus contributing to) stories that others write.

Besides the big buttons, we’re throwing in a “news feed” (thank you, facebook) that shows you recent updates. For now, since the “Friend System” isn’t in place, it shows you a general list of recent activity. Once friend following is in place, the updates will become dependent on your friends, showing all of their most recent activity.

I worked on those two things today, and it took about 6 hours to get them worked out.

Yesterday, I spent about 5 hours wrangling with the same tooltip library for jquery that Pavel did, with the same result: no success. It was incredibly frustrating, entirely fruitless work. The tooltips, once implemented, will give a nice dosage of “meta view” information on users on the site, letting you mouse over any instance of a user’s name on the site to show you a basic view of their “stats”.