Friday’s Weekly Log

March 12th, 2010 - Be the First Comment!

I happen to be lucky enough to be taking a class that allows me to get college credit for working because my job is related to my major. One of the requirements for this class is that I keep a log of what I did that week at work. Previously I have just been emailing them to myself to keep track of them, but I thought it would be a great blog category and provide some regular content so I am going to start putting them up here as well. I will apply the Log category to all of these.

So here I go:
It was spring break this week but I worked anway so I thought I would
write a journal entry. Today we rolled out the RSS and XSLT changes
that I talked about last week in my journal entry. I finally finished
up with all the blog changes and rolled them live as well. I also
modified our templates to use a PHP file that generates a CSS document
(changes the header data type so it is interpreted as one) for all the
blogs. This way if we change something we don’t have to change a bunch
of different themes, just one. It uses variables passed in the URL
(like type=single) to determine what stuff to output. I also started
to work on a authentication plugin that integrates with our current
SSO (single sign on) architecture and MediaWiki. One other thing I did
was introduce one of our workers to how CSS works. He is new and
doesn’t really know much about web programming but is definitely smart
enough to learn. He is doing pretty well with it and I barely had to
help him today after working with him for a week.

All my previous entries (newest on top):
This week I added a new feature to the photo services page to add for
checking out with waived charges. It requires you to login before you
can do it. It also record your information with the purchase. I also
added another option for the picture size on the same application.
After that I continued to work on the new wider 960px template for the
blogs. I finished most of this but I need to make sure everything
validates and then make a version for West Plains. I fixed a database
problem for the breathe easy mo site which was pretty fast. They’re
primary key was suppose to be auto incrementing but it wasn’t. I
started to work on a problem with RSS feeds going through an XSLT and
not working properly with the way our feeds interpret, but I didn’t
finish. The problem is relating to that fact that one of the XML tags
has an attribute on it and this isn’t accounted for in the XSLT.

This we I continued working on resizing the blog. I also started to
teach a fellow employee how to write CSS. Writing CSS is an intricate
part of web developing and understand how it meshes together with
other technologies and itself is critical. I also introduced him to
Firebug which will allow him to more easily test and develop the CSS
he writes. He is also a CSC major, but a freshman so he has very
little experience. It is an interesting experience and I kind of like
helping him with learn it.

Although I thought I was finished with the class tooltip popup last
week I wasn’t. I realized that it didn’t work properly in IE and also
that there were some errors with it that have to do with the
asynchronous nature of JavaScript. I had an issue where the function
called by my Ajax would run before the Tooltip returned the tooltip
contents so it would’nt properly fill the Tooltip in IE due to
caching. To fix this I modified the jQuery ToolTip plugin to call a
function after it put the content in the tooltip. This fixed
everything. I also started working on another WordPress project that
involves resizing the blog sizes to the upcoming 960px wide standard
that MSU is moving too. It has been uneventful so far.

This week I finished the magazine.missouristate.edu website and ti
should be viewable by the public now. I learned a lot about WordPress
like how to create custom widgets, plugins, and making custom pages
with custom templates. Every page on the site has been modified to use
custom fields and many other cool things. I also worked on a project
that allows you to view course information in the online course
catalog by hovering over a course in the major and minor description.
When you float over one of them a script uses an external page that
queries the database based on information passed in the URL then
returns a JSON object and function call. This causes a function i
wrote to replace the text in the popup with the information
transmitted by the ajax like call. This page isn’t live yet. I also
created a slideshow using the flickr API call to get a JSON object
with callback function and using it to create a slideshow with
easyslider. A callback function was added to easyslider to allow for
this integration. It also shows custom image information on the right
hand side of the slideshow. You can see it on the presidential search
website at http://www.missouristate.edu/presidentialsearch/missouristate.htm

I am still working on the magazine site. It is suppose to be released
on Monday for the public. Right now it is hidden from everyone except
a few people who log in to view it. I have to create a custom style
sheet to fix some compatibility issues with IE7. IE7 incorrectly uses
padding on elements and requires special styles because of it. I think
its pretty amazing that a product by such a large company could have
such a major flaw in it.

This week on continued working on the magazine.missouristate.edu
website. I finished the plugin I was writing for WordPress that allows
somone to easily embed content from various sources (youtube, .mp4
URLs, .mp3 URLs, and flickr slideshows). A lot of custom coding work
has gone into the homepage, table of contents, and archives. Even the
search and 404 pages have some custom code. Unfortunately I also spent
some of my time changing some of the design which is always annoying.
Hopefully by next week I will be done with this project and it will be
production ready.

This week I have been working on http://magazine.missouristate.edu.
This project is based uses WordPress which is based in PHP. I am
creating a custom template for the site. It will include a custom
archive, index, and table of contents pages. I am also making a plugin
for wordpress that allows easier insertion of media. I think I will be
working on this much of next week as well. I am using WordPress, PHP,
JavaScript, CSS, and HTML with Dreamweaver.

[ Category ]: Logs, programming