Adam's Work Log(Go there now)
- : Modify : Delete
By: -------------- on 11/21/02 - 05:06:27 PM CET
Just writing a message to myself from school. apt-rpm is at http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/.
new staff login : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/31/02 - 11:58:02 PM CET
It's been a while. Anyway, I added the Creature account today, which includes Newsposting and Article access. Wow, doing this made me notice how badly implemented this staff section really is. Since I created this about a year ago I've had a bunch of time to refine the basic concepts I learned on this page, so I think I'm going to do some work on it, if not a complete rewrite. We'll see. There would be a lot to do.
Anyway, in case I decide not to, here's a note to myself on the steps needed to add a new staff account.
1) Create a new htpasswd login/pass in telnet
2) Create a new menu_X.txt and menu_X_title.txt file for the new account menu. Where X is whatever indicator you want for that account.
3) Go into index.php and add the new menu type to the associative array in there
4) Add else if statement to the if nest below.
5) That's it I think.
latest discussion comments change : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 06/11/02 - 01:38:20 AM CEST
I put a couple ads in around the page, and changed the output on the front page news section slightly.
We haven't been getting a lot of comment traffic, so it was just saying "Latest Discussion" with no discussion underneath! Didn't look that great, so I changed it to only display the discussion if there is in fact a discussion. Otherwise, it'll just go back to the way it looked before I started this whole discussion mess.
Latest Comments on Front page : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 05/15/02 - 07:36:47 PM CEST
We're going to try out something new for a while. Under each webnews news item on the front page, we're displaying the latest 2 comments. They're clickable and whatnot. Hopefully this will get people's attention and we'll start getting more comments on news items.
quote bug fixed : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 04/9/02 - 08:35:18 PM CEST
The "bug" that happened when you tried to modify a webnews post that had a quote in it is fixed. It would show a <div> tag, when it should have shown a quote tag. Fixed now.
Choice between HTML and ooBB : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 04/2/02 - 08:25:50 PM CEST
I put up a small checkbox above every webnews textbox so that I could do some pimping of the OCDB using tables. So it's now possible to choose between using HTML and ooBB, but I don't want everyone using HTML. Keep using ooBB unless you have a DIRE need of something in HTML.
Finished Up Daily Traffic Stuff : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/19/02 - 08:46:43 PM CET
If you'll look down at the Traffic stuff, there are four new pages to look at. The Daily Onsite traffic, daily offsite referals, daily browser detection, and daily OS detection. The first one took the most time. After that, I just sort of copied and pasted and changed things around where they needed to be.
I updated the OS Detector. It now distinguishes between Win2000, WinXP, WinMe, Win98, WinNT, etc. More useful, since our users are almost entirely Windows users. Today is going to be a little strange looking on that page, but tommorow things should be back to normal.
Also updated the browser detector. It now counts OmniWeb, Links, Scooter, and GoogleBot.
Traffic Stuff : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/17/02 - 10:20:47 PM CET
I'm working on putting up the daily onsite/refering/browser/os pages. The counters have been going for a couple weeks now, but I haven't really had the chance or will to do them. I got sidetracked a few times, doing some research on some other stuff, and haven't finished anything yet. Soon.
Also, the total hourly page is much changed. You now only view it week by week, instead of the whole table of hours. Cuts down on the loading time by tons.
Also, put up some estimation stuff in the unique visitors section.
ooBB update & article listings fixed : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/17/02 - 07:31:00 AM CET
ooBB News:First, I want to discuss a new attribute you might want to put in your (img) tags. You may now set your images to align to a certain side, with the text wrapping around them, as if you were putting an align attribute in your <img> tags in HTML. The way you do this is...
(img left) or (img right) or (img center)
Replace the parentheses with the square brackets of course.
I'm also working on a set of tags to align text, but I'm having there are some complications with that. We'll have to see if I can figure something out.
Article Category News: I can't believe I never noticed this before, or that nobody noticed this before. The article listing, when you go to the ?page=articles page has not been updated since we moved to this new staff section. I never even put the code in to update it! I just never even thought about it. I just noticed it today because I saw that in the Drivers category, there were 5 articles, but it said there were only 4 next to the title.
Well, it's fixed now, so everything is all hunky dorry once again.
Traffic additions : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/5/02 - 06:19:19 PM CET
Did some minor work on some traffic pages. Added percentages in the monthly traffic section of the daily hits page, as well as percentages in the unique hits page. I'll probably get out the pages for the daily onsite/refered/browser/os stuff soon.
Unique Hits Problems : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/5/02 - 03:20:30 AM CET
There was a problem regarding the unique hit counter that I solved. I was include()ing the uniquehits.php file that had the cookieUniquePerson() function in it, while forgetting that I had copied the function into the traffic.php file. It was being declared twice and things were messed up. It's all worked out now though, so we'll just have to ride wait for tommorow for the numbers to synch back to normal.
Archive Update : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/4/02 - 08:42:59 PM CET
Did a little pattern matching stuff in the archive section of the site. It now displays the Month/Day/Year/etc. above the results.
Also, some minor tweaking to the comments class in the css files.
New Site Rewrite up. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 03/4/02 - 07:49:22 PM CET
I wanted to make the site completely formatted and aligned by CSS, but the ways each browser renders the box model and all sorts of other things just make this unrealistic at this point. So while I am using tables for the general framework of the site, the details are almost all CSS divs and boxes and whatnot. Here is the general table structure...
O2 Logo | 2 ads
----------------------------------- //end table
menu
----------------------------------- //end table
controlbar
----------------------------------- //end table
latest articles | News Story etc...
----------------------------------- //new table row
article loop | content
----------------------------------- //end table
Pretty simple really.
Had some initial problems with the article_header() function, but figured it out soon enough. Forgot to take out the file_close() function at the end. I was opening the file in that function before, but took it out and now am doing it in index.php, sending $file_ex to the article functions. It didn't give me any problems on my server because I don't have my warnings turned on. I should do that.
Had to do a little tweaking of the last_forum_writer() and forum_decide() functions. Set return values, since there were none before, and forum_decide() was making the wrong decision every time next_forum_time() ran out of time.
I instituted a few counters a few days ago. Daily onsite statistics, daily browser/os statistics, and daily site referal statistics. They've been going for a couple days now, but I haven't had the time to create pages in the staff section to view them. I'm going to work on a function that I can use between several pages that limit the number of rows on the page and let you go through them. Was working on that yesterday when I got into some other stuff.
That's it for now. Whew!
Oh yeah, I wanted to mention this. I finally got the copyright information in a place that actually looks halfway decent. It's at the way bottom across the bottom in a div. This is actually what caused me to start rewriting the site. Because in the old site, I was trying to get it to go all the way across the bottom, and it was such a hassle to figure out where to put it, and then it didn't work. So I wanted to make everything simpler. Well, I got it working easily, and I'm very happy with the results.
doTextStuff() to titles now! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/25/02 - 06:46:31 PM CET
I'm not sure if you guys were seeing boxes instead of supersceding 2's when you were writing O², but I was. I thought they were there because I wasn't passing them through htmlspecialchars() or something. I wasn't passing them through the same function that I was passing all the text to. And the ² worked in text, I just have the titles running through doTextStuff() now. And it fixed it.
static html stuff : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/25/02 - 12:51:07 AM CET
I'm toying with the idea of making most of the text pages into static html. What I'm doing now is pulling raw data out of text files and formatting them in the PHP. I'd like to start just include()ing html files. Not sure how it will affect loading times, but it should at least help to unload the server CPU a little.
I already did this with the latest forum threads/comments on the front page, and it went pretty well. Another easy one will be the top menu, and probably the latest articles section.
I'm also going to put the QOTD stuff in a text file instead of pulling them from the database. Not sure why I haven't already done this, but it'll get done now.
OCDB Latest Results Viewable : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/23/02 - 01:51:33 AM CET
If you'll check the OCDB page, you'll see the latest entries right there in front. That was one thing I worked on. I also did a bunch of tweaking in most of the OCDB scripts, as well as some work in the staff section.
Apon looking at the product entry for us staff members(OCDB AMD/Intel/Video options in the menu), what we have going is fairly insufficient. I'm going to look into rewriting a better file handling system than what's up there. Right now, there really is no way to add a new line in the middle of the group, you can only append it at the end. It's something I'll work on.
OCDB Results Modifying/Deleting Available : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/20/02 - 06:48:45 AM CET
I got to it and added the ability to modify the OCDB Results to the Writers and Administrators logins. You can go in and do whatever you want to them.
I'm currently working on a similar thing for our readers, so they can modify their own posts. Should be able to get that up tommorow. It's 12:48AM here, so time for bed for me.
Comments problem : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/20/02 - 12:45:21 AM CET
Had a problem with the comments where it was including itself more than once. Worked at it for a while and figured out I should use the include_once() function instead of just include(). Works now.
Update: Had a problem with the dbforum writing function. I was passing the wrong login/password to the function and it wasn't connecting. Fixed now.
Latest Forum/Comments : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/20/02 - 12:05:06 AM CET
I've been working on the latest forum/comments listing on the front page. They were both directly accessing the database before(which was killing us when slashdot linked to us those 2 times). It might not have been so bad if I hadn't had to connect to a separate database just for the forums listings, but that's the way it was.
Anyway, I changed the comments code so that it updates a text file every time someone writes a comment. Right now I'm keeping the past 30 comments in the file, and on the front page reading in 15 of them and outputting them.
I couldn't go into the forum code and change the code. I probably could have, but I didn't really want to. So I set up a "cache" so that the front page will only access the database once per hour, as opposed to every time the page was loading before. I have it so that if it has been less than an hour since the last database access, it get's the information from a text file similar to the comments one. After an hour, it rewrites the text file with the new data, and we begin again.
I haven't done anything like this before, so we'll have to see how much it helps when we start getting more hits. It should benefit the server.
Search script : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/12/02 - 07:20:30 PM CET
I modified the search script output. It looks a bit better now, and displays the dates next to the results.
Also, put up a unique visitors counter. Sets a cookie that expires after 24 hours. If the visitor doesn't have the cookie set(either they've never been there before or it's expired) it adds one to whichever day it is. If the visitor already has a cookie set, it doesn't do anything.
Changed the quote tag a little : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/9/02 - 10:09:58 PM CET
I didn't change the syntax or anything. I just changed how you write out the code and text. Before, you had to write it out like this:
Text]quote[quotedtext]/quote[more text
Now you write it out like you write out anything:
Text
]quote[quotedtext]/quote[
more text
Added Staff Member : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/8/02 - 05:28:06 PM CET
Added Lars to the Staff member list. He can now post news.
Also changed something on the staff member submission page where the email was showing up as a drop down list instead of a text field. It now shows up as a text field. Ran into a small problem with the SQL query, but deleted something in the code that popped off the last element of the entry_info array. I can't remember why I put that there in the first place, but I tested everything out without it, and it all seemed to work. So we'll give it a shot.
News posts per day : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/6/02 - 07:27:31 PM CET
Tim asked for it and I delivered. There is now a traffic page that lists the number of news posts per day, as well as total number of news posts. As for the separate users thing, I'm going to have to do some more complicated stuff to do that, so it'll take a little longer.
Update: Finally completed a long time wish from Tim. If you are logged into the staff section(look to the left of the logo to see if you are. It uses your comments membership), then the password is automatically filled in at each submission or deletion or anything.
Also got rid of a pesky error message. It didn't do anything bad, but it annoyed me anyway.
Daily Ads working again : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/5/02 - 05:25:46 AM CET
The daily advertisment page was a little messed up. This year's ads were showing up on the bottom of the page, while last year's were on the top. It's fixed now.
Finally put up OCDB modification stuff : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 02/4/02 - 09:51:36 PM CET
And it was surprisingly painless. Anyone with Writer or Administrator status can now modify the lists for the products in the OCDB. Things are added and changed all the time, and I don't really want to have to keep up with it anymore. So now anyone can do it. It's a spreading the blame sort of thing.
Non-last article modding is fixed. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 12/19/01 - 08:11:01 PM CET
There was a problem with modifying any article that was not the last submitted. Fixed it by using the $idnum variable that was "lying around". Not sure why I wasn't using it before, but oh well.
TODO:
Get an auto-password writing thing going in the staff section. The way it'll work is you'll log in. And if you're logged in, it'll write the password for you.
Going to implement a "noborder" keyword in the img tag, so if you want to create an image with no border on it(it's automatically done now), you can.
IE5 sucks. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 12/12/01 - 04:39:57 AM CET
The inconsistancies of IE are getting to me. I fixed the control bar problem, as well as the category news dash(which was misaligned again, after I thought I fixed it a first time...weird). Comparing IE5 to Mozilla(my browser of choice), they look exactly the same once again.
Teporary Change to ooBB. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 11/14/01 - 02:06:48 AM CET
Since there have been some problems with linking from images, I've decided to change things a little.
Instead of img=, we'll surround img tags with url tags to do the linking.
Language up for real this time. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 11/8/01 - 11:39:26 PM CET
Due to an unforseen problem, I had to take down the language interpreter and give you guys back html. I fixed the problem, though, so everything is back and in working order. I've spent a little time and written up a little tutorial for you guys, just in case you need a little help every now and then. You can take a look at that by going here. Try using the quote tag for all of your snippets and quotations from other sites. It'll make everything seem more uniformed, and adds more color to the site. Should be sweet if everything works out alright.
One thing I want to stress though. When you use the quote tag, do not skip a line from the previous(ie, just go to the next line) and type the tag. Otherwise, there'll be an extra line before the quotation when it displays on the main page. Here's an example of it done correctly(you can check this in the modification window).
Hello There!This is the way it should be done. Now here is the wrong way.
Hey there!See what I mean?
One more thing. There are bound to be problems that I haven't been able to think of. If that happens, .
ooBB Language is Up! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 11/7/01 - 10:21:17 PM CET
After quite a bit of toiling, I got everything finished up and it's all in working order.
First of all, in your submissions and modifications, you should now see a set of buttons and select menus to the right of the text area. Each of these will perform it's specified function(which should be fairly obvious) if you click on them. Note though, that use of these buttons require javascript to be enabled on your browser, so that's one thing you should know.
You don't need to the buttons at all to work with ooBB though. You can just type out the tag in the same way you would regular HTML. The final list of the tags is almost exactly the same as the one specified in the post below. The only differences are that there is no specifying of width and height in images, and for lists, you type list=a or list=square or list=o or list=I, or whatever list type you would like to use.
If you have any questions, or ICQ me of course. I'll try to help solve any problems you might have.
New Article display method : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/23/01 - 12:34:39 AM CEST
Yesterday was our biggest day ever(day's not over for me yet though) on our site.
We were having some trouble dealing with it yesterday, so I knew I had to change something, or we wouldn't last much longer. We've been displaying our single articles directly from the database ever since we started this thing. This works with <10,000 hits a day, as the CPU can cope with that many queries to the database. But when we started to get 4,000+ views an hour, and most of those on the latest article, well, that just didn't work out. So I set up a directory on the server and set up a little scriptlet in the script that updates or creates a text file based on the staff member's actions. By doing this, I've probably lessened the number of queries to the MySQL database by 75% at least. I'd have to ask Devsys about specific numbers, but that's probably a good guess.
I'm not sure how it'll stack up once we pass 100,000 views a day, but I guess we'll find out.
There was a small problem with an SQL query in the scriptlet from above that caused files for new articles to not be created, which made the article not display correctly. I fixed it though, so all is well again.
I've decided to put the messaging system on hold and am focusing on finishing the ooBB(like vB or uBB, but Overclockers Online BB) system. What this will entail is that HTML will no longer work in anything anymore. That means typing bold tag will result in that being interpreted as text, not HTML. Here is what I have so far.
[quote][/quote] - This is for all the times in news or articles where you want to quote another site. It will indent and change the color of the text. It'll look nice.
[b][/b], [u][/u], [i][/i] - Self-explanatory. Bold, Underline, Italics.
[url]http://www.overclockersonline.com[/url] - This is the basic link tag when you want to link to a url and display the URL as the text as well.
[url=http://www.overclockersonline.com]OO Website[/url] - This is a more advanced url tag. It will link to the URL indicated, and display the text between the tags as the link.
For both URL tags, it automatically links to a new window. The first click opens a new window, and every succeeding click will go to the same window.
[font][/font] - This is the font face. eg. Arial.
[color][/color] - This is the font color. eg. blue or #FFFF00.
[size][/size] - This is the font size. Goes from 1 to 7.
[email]adamplumb@mediaone.net[/email] - This is similar to the first url tag in that it opens an email window, and displays the address as the link text.
[email=adamplumb@mediaone.net]Email Me![/email] - This opens an email box and displays the text in between the tags.
[img width=x height=y]http://www.b.com/image.jpg[/img] - This shows an image. Both width and height are optional attributes, though the URL is required of course.
Note: For all of these tags, if you do not type it correctly, the tag and whatnot will just display as regular text, so make sure you've got it right before you submit it.
If anyone has any suggestions or comments, feel free to contact me on ICQ or by email. I'm working on a [list][/list] tag with options for ordered, unordered, or lettered.
Also, just so you know, none of this is functional at the moment. HTML still works just fine, so go about your business as usual.
Practice Articles Up. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/11/01 - 09:14:14 PM CEST
For the article writers, here's a nice little thing for you. I put together some stuff so you could save all your articles and writings on the database here, and work on them anywhere or anytime. It could be a good thing.
I'll be working on a little messaging system for the staff section next most likely.
Author-to-Email-to-Author UP! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/5/01 - 06:20:02 AM CEST
It took quite a bit of studying up on my javascript, and even more playing around with different ideas, but I got it so that when you submit something with both an author and email field, the two fields are always synchronized. That means that when you choose "Adam Plumb" from the drop down menu, the Email field below it will automatically change to "atticus@overclockersonline.com". And when you switch through the email field, the exact opposite thing will happen. The Author field will change.
Because of the dynamic way in which I create the submission forms, I couldn't access each field in javascript the way I first expected to. I had to use the elements array, which went something like this. document.main_form.elements[x].selectedIndex. It wasn't working for a long time though, and I kept trying different things. What I didn't realize was that the hidden fields that I put before the entry fields was being added to the elements array. So when I was trying to use the elements[2] element, it should really have been the #6 element or something. Boo-yeah!
Javascript has turned out to be quite a useful tool for me. Especially for little things such as the above, and moving people around throughout different pages, and whatnot.
New Registration Page. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/4/01 - 09:04:32 PM CEST
The registration page linked to from all the pages on the site have been pointing to the the registration page on the old forum. The old forum and the comments all used the same memberships and whatnot, so I just killed two birds with one stone. Now that we're not using the old forum anymore, going to that page is not something we want to do, so I wrote up a little registration script(all CSS, like the staff section), so it just opens a little window where people can register.
I'm going to need to rearrange the front page a little, or find somewhere to put a little login form for people. I've been thinking of ways in which to redesign the headlines area on the top there, so that I can possibly fit the login screen there. I might put it on top of the ads area on the bottom right though. That might work.
I've been thinking of ways to rearrange the headlines since before I started working on the login stuff. I want it a little bit better looking, not so messy and chaotic. My photoshop skills(or lack thereof) are really holding me back though. Practice makes perfect, or so they say.
Staff Member addition : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 10/3/01 - 11:33:04 PM CEST
There were some problems with the SQL query to enter in new staff members. There was an extra element in the entry_info array. Not sure where it came from, but it seems to only be there in the staff member query. I just wrote up an if statement to pop the thing off for only the staff section. I'll probably take a closer look at that and try to figure out where it originally came from. For now, though. Everything works.
Weekly Info and Traffic code change : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/21/01 - 07:05:30 PM CEST
I wanted to see some numbers on week by week hit averages, so I put up a script to do just that in the Traffic section. I may add something to it sooner or later if it pleases me, but it's interesting just the same.
Also, changed the code a little so that the menu items send the variable for the traffic file through the query string. It's better this way, so I won't have to go into the code and add another else if statement and manually write out the name.
I'm going to look into adding some functionality for modifying more than one section of the menu at once. With some sort of checkbox to designate which ones I want to effect. Getting sick of changing each one manually.
Menu Modification...Advanced! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/21/01 - 06:10:10 PM CEST
Gave myself the ability to choose between the menus for each user/security level when I modify them. Turned out easier than I thought it might. It helps when you open all your files with the same variable name($file_url). Doing that, I only had to write up a small page where the user chooses between the different levels, and then is transported to that page. Easy peasy, japaneasy.
Hmm...not sure if I want to start doing that article saving thing Tim was talking about. And when I do, not sure if I want that in a whole new section of code, or as part of everything else. I think I might make it a different section, and get started on that individual user stuff(For the messaging system and this) before I do anything else.
Traffic Up. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/20/01 - 10:24:26 PM CEST
I gave the traffic pages a facelift and they're up now. So I guess as of now, the staff section is complete. Or at least as complete as it was originally intended. BTW, I'm not sure why, but the Hourly Averages page is a bit screwed up. I'll look into it, but I couldn't get it to align properly. It still works just fine, it's just misaligned.
Menu-by-User UP! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/20/01 - 08:45:00 PM CEST
Getting this thing up turned out an incredibly simple task. I just set up text files for each of the login/passwords, and modified as I saw each user level should see.
Doing this gave me ideas for something a bit more grand however. I'm going to set up a system of sorts where you have a login(your own, not the .htaccess one), and you'll be able to login from anywhere and work on an article or something, and then you can just store it back into the database. Say if you're on a trip somewhere and you have a notebook(electronic that is) handy, just log into the server and work on whatever you wish. Could come in handy. Another thing I'll be doing is giving us the ability to send email/messages to eachother through the staff section. Everytime a user logs in, he'll be shown if he has any new messages, and will have an inbox and whatnot to store his messages. It should be pretty cool.
BTW, last thing for me to do to complete the staff section is the traffic stuff. For now, if you would like to view the traffic stuff, just go to the same place you used to go in the old section, except the directory is now staffb/daily.php.
File Handling Finally Handled. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/19/01 - 04:49:30 AM CEST
In my realization that I was handling the file reading/writing stuff in a messy manner, I decided to figure out a better way to do things. Before, I had the text files, and each line had it's own set of titles(for the column titles), and it was all in the same file. Well, I separated the titles and data into separate files. It's much cleaner this way, and I won't have to add work for the front page to do.
I didn't get to any traffic stuff today, but that, and the menu-by-user stuff is all I have left. Everything else is golden.
Up on the Server! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/17/01 - 06:43:19 PM CEST
There were a few initial problems with write permissions and the implode() function, but other than that, everything has worked out fine in the initial run on the server. We'll have to see how the front page looks when someone updates a news story. I'm pretty sure it'll look fine, but just in case, let's cross our fingers. Next up for me is menu-by-user. Should be easy now that we're on the server.
Menu Modification : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/16/01 - 06:30:33 PM CEST
Got the menu modification stuff working. Ugh...Working with a database is just so much cleaner and easier than text files. Just getting the text files modification stuff done took about as long as the entirety of the rest of the page. Well, that's all there is for now. I've still got to get the stuff done about changing the menu for each user. But I'll have to do that last, since I don't have an .htaccess directory on my computer. I'm sure I could, and maybe I will, but we'll see. Traffic stuff is next I guess.
Menu modifier : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/13/01 - 08:35:41 PM CEST
The page is starting to get complex enough that I can't remember what everything does sometimes. I've been working on the menu modification system, and it seems to be working. I'm trying to get the deletion of individual menu items working(and later, whole sections), but my brain doesn't seem to be functioning properly. I'm going to take a break and get back to it later.
Getting things finished. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/13/01 - 05:39:58 AM CEST
Things are really getting done with the staff section. I finally got the file writing stuff done for the front page. Turned out to be fairly simple, though I kept getting array_slice() and substr() mixed up, with hilarious results!(not).
I also got the Hot Deals and Quick Links modifier finished up and working. At first, I had created a separate file reader script, which I was going to call from a separate section in the code called fileread. That turned out not to work so well, though, so I integrated it with the rest of the code about as best I could. I've got a variable I've been using called $act(short for action). It carries several possible variables. 'sub', 'mod', 'del', 'set', and 'file'. The first three are self-explanatory. The fourth is to set the current poll, and the fifth tells the script that it is reading in a text file, as opposed to the database.
As for my last TODO, I've gotten everything done except for the traffic and menu-by-user stuff. One last thing I've got to get done(and I'm going to do in a second), is add the functionality to add and delete quick links and hot deals lines. I'm only working 5PM-9PM tommorow, so I'll have some time to work on this stuff. I believe I'll tackle the menu-by-user thing first.
I am so clever! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/7/01 - 05:28:00 AM CEST
Oh frig! I typoed the password and when I pressed back the whole message I had typed(a good long one) had dissapeared. Let's see if I bother to type anything near as good this time.
I had an epiphany this afternoon while coding. I realized while beginning to connect the modification stuff with the submission stuff that way I was organizing the sections in my code was pretty clunky. I came up with a method that just blew my mind. It wasn't anything revolutionary, but it I thought it great. Instead of Submission/Modification/Deletion sections in the code(not the page you see in your browser, mind you), I made one section to display the form submission(form_entry), one to display the table to choose your ID number to modify something(id_choose), one to check for empty fields(I'll get to this one), and one to delete specific things directly in the HTML. I'll make one that finally submits and updates the database directly as well.
I spent a good while getting the empty field checker thing to work. Basically what it does is check all the fields in a form(everything from staff member submission to news modification), and if one of the fields is empty, tells you which it is. Since everything is based on arrays, I just set up a loop to go through the array and check if it was empty. If not, it sends the information to the section that talks to mySQL. If it is empty, it lists all the empty fields. There was some weird stuff going on that took me a little while to figure out, but in the end it turned out very well. I'm very pleased.
TODO:
- Finish up work on the individual article page deletion.
- Get the submitter/modifier to start talking to mySQL.
- Get the poll stuff working.
- Get the traffic stuff working.
- Get the menu-by-user stuff working.
-
Clean up.
Update: Turned out almost as good
Staff Section Fun : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/6/01 - 04:23:33 AM CESTWorked on the staff section a bit after work today. Most of the time was spent in designing the modification/deletion navigation system. I'm talking about the equivilent of what we have now of a table that you choose the numbers from. Should be nice.
Also found out that having all of that form stuff in a function is just not going to work. Put it into an include file and all seems to be working fine. The only problem I had was this stupid statement at the top of the file where I forgot a semicolon. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why nothing was working. And finally I saw the problem there. Ack.
I'm working my way, piece by piece, to the database/file writing stuff that I need to do. After that, it's all about the tracking information and menu-by-user setup. After that, I should be done.
Tommorow-possible-to-do. Get the submitter to work, and then work on the mod/del stuff.
New staff section coming along. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 09/5/01 - 03:05:59 AM CESTI had been aiming for an all-CSS/no-table design for the new staff section, but alas, it was not meant to be. I've still got most of the CSS intact, but the positioning proved to be too frustrating, since every browser seems to format the stuff differently. So I'm using tables now to position the CSS boxes. It's a neat little compromise, and there are only three tables so far, one nested. Not too shabby.
I'm mostly working on getting all the forms correct. I'm trying to do this all with one script, instead of the many we're using now, so at this point I'm just getting the right stuff to show up. I've got 3 or 4 days of working at Bertucci's starting tommorow at 8AM, so I won't have much time to work on this until the weekend, but at least I got some stuff done.
Note to self: Finish up the page_title/text thing next time.
Poll Comments and line borders : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/29/01 - 02:50:28 AM CESTI haven't tested this on every browser, but on every one I have tested, all except IE5.0 don't show the lines dividing the three columns in the page. I tested the page in Netscape 4.7, and the lines didn't show up, but couldn't quite come up with a plausible non-CSS solution. Finally, tonight, I figured it out with no CSS, so all is once again well with the world.
There was also a thing with people leaving comments in the poll, and then having them showing up in the latest comments. It would link wrongly. Well, that should be fixed now too. If you get any problems with it, let me know.
TODO: I'll take a look and see what the border on top looks like. If it looks like ass, no dice.
Update 5 minutes later: Did it, looks fine. I'll keep it up.
New Staff Section. : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/23/01 - 02:33:36 AM CESTSpent quite a few hours today and began the new Staff Section. I have quite a few ambitions for this thing. For one, it's going to be completely table free. It's all CSS div and span tags. That part is more for me to learn from though, as it doesn't really make much difference either way in the end. The other part is that, instead of relying on 20 or more scripts to do all the work, and huge if/else statements, submission of news/webnews/articles/journal/etc will all be based on the same code. Before, they were all separate entities.
It's also going to look much better than what we have now.
Fixed the setpoll page : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/20/01 - 06:45:00 PM CESTThe Set Poll page wasn't loading, because I had the $idnum number decrementing in an if statement that wasn't always returning true(there is no else statement). I moved the decrementing out of the if statement, and back into the general loop, so everything is working fine now.
Poll Stuff : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/16/01 - 09:09:46 PM CESTSpent a few hours and finally got that modify/delete poll stuff up and running. Everything is working well. I briefly thought about the ability to add or remove poll answers, but it would just mess up the database table something awful, so I decided it wasn't worth it. If you've got to change the number of answers, just delete the thing and start over.
Also, I added the links to the staff page, and took away the "Poll" radio button from the mod.php top.
I'm going to get on that print/email hit counter thing soon.
Modify and delete stuff! : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/16/01 - 04:06:00 AM CEST - Added links to the site for news people to modify or delete a post. This way, they don't need to come into the staff section and all that mess. Should make it less of a hassle to modify your stuff.
- Added worklog to webadmin.php, and changed it into a function, rather than just regular code.
Update:
-
Added worklog display to the webadmin.php page, so everyone can see it.
Update2:
Woops, looks like I already added that other one premptively. Don't read the first update!
A few more things : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/16/01 - 02:54:33 AM CEST - Added the Modify/Delete and Go there now links on the Staff main page, to the worklog.
- Put up a little "or die()" functionality on the main page. If the MySQL db goes down again, the server probably won't crash again. Or maybe it will, what do I know?
Update:
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Ick. Forgot about a little unfinished addition I made to the classes page. Page was down for a couple minutes due to a parse error. Fixed it though.
First Work Log : Modify : Delete
By: Adam Plumb on 08/16/01 - 02:25:23 AM CESTThis is just a little thing I threw together so I could write down what I've done, programming-wise, for the site. I probably should have thought of this sooner, but oh well. I think for now, I'll just make up a list of the things I've done...
- Made the work log script(submit/modify/delete/display). Thinking about a new way to structure the staff section.
- Yesterday I finished up the daily ad tracking.
That's it for now.
TODO:
- A little more error checking for the front page.
- Print/email hit counter for those popup pages.