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!

An interesting dilemma

Today, I was working again on the form JavaScript. Getting rid of the check boxes is more difficult than I originally thought. the problem is that i need to represent the activities in some way. I thought of using an array, to pass to the post page, however this requires php and I'm trying to find a way round this for reasons I'll go into in a moment.

Eventually I opted to have an activity hidden element for each activity, then a small piece of JavaScript that updates the inner HTML whenever a choice is altered. this would be bad design if there were many check boxes, but with only 6, there's no point over-engineering the site right now.

I don't want to use php, because if we're using the laptops like standalone stations it seems to me that there's no sense running an entire server on each one, and there must be a more efficient way to collect the data. It seems that JavaScript can be used to write to the server, so I'm going to pursue that route.

Aside from that not much to report. Tomorrow I'm going to add the last of the questions and get working on posting to the server.

Tuesday summary

Today I was coding from 9till 5, integrating the forms together. I copied the code from my Javascript form into the Css form and began making everything work from there. My main trouble was with getting rid of the check boxes and having the images themselves as the checkboxes. the problem is I need to store the array for activities and pass it through to the post page. progress is good so far and i'm going to spend some more time on the problem tonight.

Tomorrow I'm going to work on creating the Slider, which is apparently very easy in Jquery so I'll be looking into that.

Monday review/plan for the week

I've decided to try doing these blogs at the end of each day instead of the beginning, so that there can be one every day and not 2 on Friday. This morning began with a meeting with Lorraine and Janet over in the user centre. I showed them the prototype I've been working on for the past week and they seemed happy about it.

There were many new things to think about that we hadn't really considered in depth before. for example copyright on the images we use in the grid. The solution round that one is to get some new images, I know plenty of photographers so i'm thinking of getting one in for an hour. another was the granularity of the persons course. Is computing too vague, or do we need to include every degree in the University?

I spent the rest of the day working on the forms. I intend to have all the methods of posting data to the file sorted by wednesday, then I can concentrate on the look and feel of the application for the next few days. I'll need to learn a bit about passing arrays in php, but aside from that it should be fairly straightforward. by the end of this week I want the form finalised to the point that we just need to think about wording.

Thursday/Friday catch-up

I neglected to write my Friday blogs and the week review, So I'll do it today instead

Thursday
On thursday I spent the morning working on the forms some more,
At the meeting with Janet and Marianne I showed the form design so far, and we came up with a fantastic idea. The Idea is to use some ol laptops that aren't being used anymore in each of the learning spaces to gather data while students are there. We decided to have a prototype ready for Monday in the user centre so my focus on Friday would turn to posting to a file.

The problems that started to appear were that my code is getting more and more complex and beginning to look a bit cluttered, so I'll need to do some refactoring when I begin to combine the 3 forms.

Friday
On Friday I spent the whole day writing php code that can write responses from the form into a text file. the reason was not to have structured data, but just to show I could post to a file.
I found this to be much more of a hassle than I assumed, becausi I had to first set up an XAMPP server configuration on my laptop, and my laptop didn't like that I had another installation from a while ago, but i still managed it. The forms still need some time, hopefully i can work on them on Monday.

Overall for the week I spent most of my time on the implementation rather than the design, which i was very happy about. we now have a solid start that can only be improved over time.

Complex != Cool

Since I was meeting Ramanee Pieres yesterday I decided to look up her page on the School of computing website, and what i found as astonishing. Ramanee has ben involved with 24 publications spanning across at least 10 years. To add to that the subjects she was involved in were close to the kind of computing I'm interested in. one paper that caught my eye was "The effects of simulating human conversational style in a computer-based interview", which you have to remember was written in the year 2000, before social networking was around. So I went across to find out about the SMS facilities of the University and we ended up talking for a good 30-40 minutes about user centered design, social networking and some general ways to make my forms more effective in capturing an audience, which is a primary goal.

The SMS functions appear fairly simple, to send a mass text I'll need a list of numbers and a message, and to recieve It's a case of setting up a prefix code and an address to forward the message on to.

I spent the next few hours working on my 3 forms before my 3:30 meeting with Lorraine. I printed the 3 forms in their current states to let her see where I was with each one. She seemed pleased with the progress so far and even liked the idea of a funny picture or graphic at the end of each page. Unfortunately Ramanee will be away the next few weeks, so I'll be spending the time developing the web application.

Today though I have a meeting with Janet and Marianne Kenley, who's in charge of all the space in Dundee campus. I'm going to continue worming on forms until the meeting, focusing on Javascript. The problem i see today is The voi between practical ideas and complicated code, but I will persist!

Basking in the warm glow of Javascript

Yesterday I started on 3 sample forms for the Thursday meeting. I decided one woul be HTML only, another would Implement Javascript for some dynamic content, and the 3rd would implement some smooth looking CSS stylesheet, with the intention of mixing and matching the 3 to endup with an accessible Form which also has the potential of being flashy.

The problem Iwas coming up with was striking a balance between something that looks great, and something that has clear code. I've ended up with tables inside tables an layout problems. I wanted to have a fade effect in the Javascript form, but the code required for this was massive in the online example!

Today I plan to go see Ramanee pieres in the morning to find out about SMS services in the university, then I'm going to prepare some more information for Lorraine for this afternoons meeting, with screenshots of what the web section might look like and details about SMS messages.