Friday, August 31, 2007

Somehow, I found a way to get some serious work done on ELCRo this week.

I got the RSS reader all up and running in the program logs. It's pretty good, I think. It's basic, but it gets the job done. When you click the headline, the line expands to show the whole article and the headline becomes a link to the article. I still don't have a way to collapse the articles yet, but that will come in due time. The articles can be sorted by time or by site, but not all of the sites provide times with their feeds so I made the backend code add a time 24 hours in the past to those articles. Also, weather.com articles always have the time that they were accessed since they are generated on the fly.

Wednesday, while doing my show, I came up with the idea to have the current weather conditions always available when in live mode. This information is pulled from weather.com and displayed in the empty space to the right of the display section's tabs. It was a little annoying to work with because I had to write a script to find the correct article in the feed. If they ever change the subject line, I'll have to update the code. Then I had to get rid of the image and the "For more details..." at the end. I did it very basically since those seem to be static to every post. If they change this, I'll need to update the code as well.

I still can't figure out why the form in the program logs won't clear after you submit it sometimes. It only seems to happen on the log computer at the radio station, so I still think that the computer is just struggling to keep up with all of the scripting. I did fix a bug that I didn't know existed until now. Ampersands were not being escaped as they need to be for the GET method of submitting forms. This was a big problem in the music search and in the program log. It was a simple fix once I figured out that I just needed to add "escape()" to each of the terms. I only put this in for the program logs and the music search so some of the older pages my still have problems.

Some other features that I've added this week are:
  • Got the stats tab up and running in program logs. This will get more stats later, but it's a good start.
  • When using the move albums function, there is now an option to only show albums that have been reviewed. This should make moving albums from the drawer to playlist much easier. I also added the album ID number next to the album name as well.
  • In the DJ details page, I added a stats tab and removed the program log and album reviews tabs. The stats tab shows the numbers of each and clicking the numbers will bring you to the search page with those listed as results.
  • The music search page can now accept search terms via GET so links to searches can be made.
  • I started slowly switching the links for artist names so that they link to the music search page and automatically search for that artist. Linking to the album details page will now be done from the album name and/or ID number.
  • Made location select box in the program log music search an absolute width so that everything is on one line.
Additionally, I also redesigned and renamed the home page. It is now actually called the home page instead of the main menu. The layout is now a three column set up. At the top there is a horizontal bar that displays the old titlebar messages. I may or may not make only the tips messages stay. I haven't decided yet. Below that, going left to right, there is a column with user information, a column with bulletin/blog entries and a column for reviews. The user info section provides the user's name, number of program logs, points, number of album reviews and open issues. Everything except for points are links. The middle section displays the last 15 active bulletin and blog entries posted and the right section displays the last 15 album reviews posted.

All in all, I got a damn lot done over the last couple weeks. I'm thinking that this will probably be the complete feature set for v3.0, but maybe a few minor things will sneak their way in. Mostly, I want to spend the next few days debugging a bit so that by Tuesday when I unveil this, it's as good as it can be. I'd like to make the home page look nice and pretty, but that probably won't happen.

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