Speaking of Dates

Times and Timezones can be a pain as well. I was definitely happy that I ran across a method of automatically converting dates to the proper timezone with Javascript. Ecmanaut has several interesting articles on dates, times, and usability, the relevant one being on timezone best practices.

One of the commenters pointed out a post at RedHanded on something called PerfectTime. The article pointed to a more elegant version by Mike West, which was great except for it’s use of an invalid attribute, which he addressed by using the <abbr> tag.

These are very clever ways of getting localized time without a lot of back-end infrastructure and coding, which I like. I’m not sure if this will be the most appropriate way to handle things in Events, which could have dozens upon dozens of times, so we’ll have to keep an eye on performance, but I really like these as good starting points.

The only other issue I’d be concerned with would be browsers with improperly set times/timezones… I have no idea how prevalent that is.

IE6 Compatibility: Back for Now

Between the Peekaboo Bug and some issues with prototype, we were having some fairly annoying issues with IE6. A few hours of tearing my hair out this afternoon seems to have produced a solution. For now.

 

Thanks to PositionEverything.net and Prototype’s latest stable release, things seem to be fine.

 

The only problem now is that some of the effects cause a “Stack Overflow Error at line 0″ in IE6. I think this is more a function of my “standalone” version of IE6, but I’ll check on some older computers at the office next week to be sure.

Registration Done

When you’re just throwing a site together, or when you anticipate a small (or highly technical) audience, some of “supporting characters” on the site might not need to have the same level of investment as the the main features. Take user registration, for instance. A few fields tossed on a barebones form, a submit button, and some slightly less than cryptic error messages might suffice in some cases. In this case, though, we felt it was important to make every step of the process as usable and user-friendly as possible. That’s why I spent more time designing, tweaking, and coding the PostFresh registration screen than I have any other I’ve worked on. I’m pretty happy with the result.

The main feature of the registration screen is preliminary validation of all of the required form elements. We use AJAX to check the availability of the username, your email and password are evaluated in the browser, and you even get on-screen confirmation that your passwords match. In addition, each field has specific instructions as to what is required.

Over the coming week I’m hoping to get the rest of the user management features finished up, including integration of the TypeKey and OpenID systems into the login and event handling. After that we move on to event management. Hard to say how far out we are right now. I’m guessing sometime in the second half of June we should be ready for initial beta release. The plan is still for that to be a relatively limited release. More to come on that this week.

Design is Live

Although it seemed as though we had dropped off the face of the earth, we’re back and the new design is live. We’ve got a little bit more development before we’re ready to open registrations again or do any more demos, but this is a step in the right direction.

School and work came between us and our pet project for a few months, but we’re back on the horse.

Anyway… go check it out. Your comments are welcome.

New Design Teaser

In the next week or two things will start back up again in a major way. In the mean time, have a look at a screen shot of the design that we’re working on implementing:

We’re pretty happy with it.

Still Cruising

Lots of work going on behind the scenes, but not much to speak of. The site design is coming together and we’re putting the finishing touches on the business plan. New features are still coming slowly, although we’re going to be pausing that soon when we start to deploy the sexy new design.

One thing worth mentioning, though, is that my problems with opera and Script.aculo.us/Prototype have been cleared up thanks to a commenter who suggested that I download the version of prototype that was being used on the Script.aculo.us site. That cleared the problems right up. Hopefully the forthcoming release of prototype doesn’t contain these same bugs.

Approaching Beta

After the public demo, which went smashingly well (big thanks to Orson from EDSBS for joining us), our plan was to move forward into something of a Beta phase. No major bugs were uncovered during the demo, so that plan will continue apace.

More specifically, development will continue with the actual event application, but there’s lots of administrative things that need to be developed now, too. The final design should be agreed upon this week, and then it needs to be implemented. There are a few more features we want to get worked in (including Pagination for those long events, and Remote Blog Integration, which I’ve talked about before) and we’ll also be putting together a short video showcasing the features.

From this point things could happen quickly, or they might take a few weeks. Time will tell.

LiveDemo Imminent

Not much else to say… we’ll be keepin’ it real over at PostFresh.com starting at 7:45pm eastern. Hope to see you all there!

Late Nights and Snags

Things are still on pace for tomorrow night’s LiveBlog, although last night was a late one. Every developer has come across a time when something stops working for what seems like no reason at all. Being mostly logical people, developers realize that it’s not possible for code to work and then stop working if nothing has changed… but finding what changed or, just as importantly, why that change matters, can be a stressful, frustrating experience.

Last night I was having a problem where a javascript function would not complete, but it would also not throw an error. It just seemed to die, leaving half of the function uncompleted. It ended up being a problem with a javascript for…in loop. The for…in loop iterates over every member of an object… every single one. This includes inherited members and (I think) methods. I’m not sure where, exactly, this caused the problem, but it looks like there are parts of the prototype/script.aculo.us library that, if they fail in a certain way, fail silently.

I also ended up having to re-tool one of the display algorithms because it choked when using the display effects on a large number of new items. Those things seem to be working now, and features are slowly being implemented in preparation for tomorrow’s demo.

Public Demo & Plans for Beta

Public Demo: Jan 7th
We’ve reached a point in the development that I think we’re ready to flip another switch. On the 7th we’re having a public demo of the capabilities in the form of a LiveBlog of the GMAC Bowl. Because I’m not very funny, we’ve rounded up a venerable (and funny) LiveBlogging expert from Every Day Should Be Saturday to take care of things for us. It should be a pretty good time and for those who care more about PostFresh and less about college football (in general) or that bowl game (in specific), it’ll be a good example of the features.

Plans for Beta
After the demo, if things go well, we’ll spend a few days squashing some bugs and fine-tuning before we start opening up for beta testing. Things are still subject to change, but we anticipate that the early stages of the beta will work like this:

If you have an event you want to liveblog, you’ll let us know in advance (there will be a form) and we’ll slowly open the nozzle number, frequency, and size of the blogs so that we can keep an eye on performance and bandwidth.

Once we’re satisfied that performance is where it should be and our host is satisfied that it won’t take down the whole noc, we’ll start into a period where beta testers will be able to start events at the drop of a hat, as they please, and we’ll increase the number of hosts until we’re happy with where the software is, at which point we’ll release it to the public. Beyond the very first stage of this, we have no solid time-line.