long time catch up

It's been a long time since I posted anything, but the system is now ready to be put into operation. The intention was to develop a prototype that can later be worked on and developed, and that is what I intend to do until someone takes over. there is now an application for adding data to an underlying database, there is error checking on the web form as it is input. There are new images, I've re-worded the procrastination option finally with a smooth "cooling off". the slider couldn't be implemented yet so radio buttons are there in place, and there's a Dundee logo at the top. there's also a thank you page that is shown as soon as the data is saved to a file.

There's also a basic description of what ILS spaces are, and I've re-worded much of the form.

When I install the application to more pc's I'm going to do many things. I'm going to hide the base files, add some password protection if possible and continue to improve the security on the Application.

Right now the way to view data is through the phpMyAdmin page, and if I had time I was going to write another small application for viewing the data, but again I believe phpmyadmin to be suitable for now. This week and probably the week after I'll be installing the data gathering tools to PC's, setting up fancy ways to get people looking at the feedback form, and tomorrow /today I have a demonstration with many of the people that have been involved in the project, to present my work.

my list of small worries about the form just now are:

Having the ILS logo at the top next to Dundee logo?

Auto-deleting files once added to database? problem if recording files fails.

info about where results will be posted on the thank you screen

not sure on order of questions

Other activity text too drastic?

Thursday boost :D

after the trawling trying to get Javascript working yesterday in Firefox and IE it's a relief today to find that one small semicolon was causing all the trouble, and only Chrome was good enough to pick it up and correct it for me - silly do gooders!

Once that was done I amended the Date stamp in the post page to make it more familiar in the DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS form(if that makes sense)

I also have the tokenising working, but I think I may be taking it too far with the urlEncode, I mean the only time I'll use it in HTML will be at the other end, so that validation may change.

and finally I Wrote C# Appliation that allows reading of files, will be used to add to central database. Tomorrow I'm going to start by doing parsing with the emails, then the big stuff, and if that all goes fine i'll start on the database.

I decided to collect emails seperate from everything else, so that they remain truly anonymous and aren't linked to any perticular set of responses. Problem i see is making it all secure later on, but I'll get it.

Monday frustration

I've discovered that Internet explorer doesn't like my javascript, so I've spent the day trying to work out why. I think i've sourced it to the way that IE includes javascript files, but so far i've had no luck in getting it to behave :(

aside from that I've got everything in the form posting through now, and It's validated too with hidden location fields and a timedate stamp. so far on the list of things to do I have the following

Fix Javascript for IE

improve colour scheme

write to file

write to Database/read from database

install on multiple laptops

re-word procrastination

add ILS logo

new photos

add Jquery slider

modify to highlight current question

Tomorrow I'll be focusing all my attention on designing the storage mechanism. From saving files to reading them, and the extent to which i want human involvement.

Designing some data gathering

An Interesting problem has come up this morning, I knew about it earlier but it's getting close to when I'll need it so I'll detail it here

As far as gathering the data in each individual area, that's fairly sorted now, but the problem that will come once we have the data strewn about 10 different places is going to be getting them all to the one place.

I'm storing the responses in a text file at the moment, and plan to parse the data from files into a single database, but to avoid duplicating responses, I'll have to delete the files once they're in the database. this means whoever's gathering data has to do more, so I'm considering writing a small file that will be used just to collect the different files then replace the file with a blank one. This is all bells and whistles though, I could collect the data in any number of ways from manual input to some fancy web service.

Aside from that, I've been looking into using Jquery for a slider. It's either that or some good old fashioned radio buttons for those without javascript

Another problem that's appeared which makes no sense to me is that the javascript doesn't work in internet explorer, so i'm going to write some noScript alternative.

Once I'm happy that my form is posting to a file in the correct way i'm going to compile a list of small tasks to complete on the form and just go through them one by one, then get a few people to do their best to break everything :)

Friday Catch up

Just a quick update on what i've been upto this week. I've learned I must do the app in either php or asp so that i can pass information between pages, so after choosing php it's just been a case of posting data from the form to another page and displaying it. Haven't got Jquery working yet so for now the slider is radio buttons. Going to work on it some more over the weekend, but the basic questions all seem set now, it's just using little selling tricks to make them more appealing. I've removed the cat and philosoph quotes from the page for now, until i find something that fits the smooth flow better. will update on monday what i do over the weekend.

Tuesday update

I've been spending the last 2 days making the javascript code work, there's a problem with getting it to work in Internet Explorer, but I'll give a more detailed report tomorrow

Thursday update

not much to report today, just been connecting the feedback form to a post page, so now data can be sent between the pages. all that's left to do tomorrow is write to file in an appropriate way and I can call the prototype complete!