Forums were down for about five minutes today at around 1:50pm whilst I updated the vbSEO software to version 3.0 Gold. Technical information on the update can be found at vbSEO’s announcement page here.
Hopefully that didn’t ruin anyone’s STR surfing pleasure today. As always we try to keep the website’s software updated. Regular updates of software ensure a secure and reliable website.
Thanks and have a great day!
I’d like to thank Andy (Sprockethead) & Traci (Surlygal) for discovering two bugs in the new homepage. Without their feedback these two bugs would have gone unnoticed by me.
Andy noticed that the “Logged in as ___” would overlap a bit if the username was long and it wrapped to the next line. Traci discovered a more obscure bug that only occurred for members who were logged in and had 0 posts. The whole left side where the recent topics are supposed to be would fill up with ugly error messages. Both these bugs were easy fixes but like I said . . . much credit goes to Andy and Traci for taking a couple minutes to report the bugs.
The new look has been fairly well received by our members. Hopefully it makes everyones STR experience just a little bit more pleasant.
As kind of a side note. . .
Update for injured list: still in the planning stages. Pencil and paper have been the primary tools until today when I made a couple entity relationship diagrams and some interface designs with OmniGraffle. Slowly but surely this will come together.
Ever since I was down with poison oak I’ve occasionally tossed around the idea of having an STR Injured List. Reading the rider down thread reminded me of the list idea. The basic premise behind this is for members to record when they’re down with an injury and having a list of those who are currently injured. Much like the injured reserve lists that a professional sports team might have.
Some functionality that I plan for this:
** warning: slight technical mumbo-jumbo **
I’ve begun the database design for this and have laid out a rough sketch of the programming needed for this. It’s all fairly straightforward but will be a medium sized project because of the permission checking and making forms that will efficiently interact with the database.
** tecnical mumbo-jumbo off **
Of course I can’t really give a date when this new functionality will be completed since I also have school/work/riding/etc but I’ll give a rough guess of a month or two.
If you have ideas or features that would be great to have on the injured reserve list, feel free to comment on this blog.
The page I’m blogging about was mentioned in a previous blog. It’s at: http://www.socaltrailriders.org/ducks/
Finally figured out an obscure little Internet Explorer bug related to the CSS drop down menus when utilizing the ’suckerfish’ technique. Well . . . I didn’t really figure it out myself. More like I Googled the problem and found an answer.
The menu technique is described here: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/
Because of the way javascript had been used to make up for Internet Explorer’s shortcomings, only one menu could be used. I had plans to use two menus; one menu for creating threads and another for creating calendar events. This person had a solution which worked as advertised.
With Parallel’s fired up I had 4 browsers across my screen for a round of testing:
All browsers faired well with the menus except for IE7 which has a new CSS bug. The menu’s wouldn’t collapse after the mouse was moved away from the menu. Again, Google provided an answer. By adding this little bit of code:
#nav li:hover {background-position: 0 0}
IE7 was able to display the menu just fine. Here are some things I’ll work on in the following days:
Here’s a screenshot of one of the two suckerfish menus:
I guess I should find some time to also work on homework?
This blog has three parts. The first is a rant, the second is a tip for other web developers, and the third is the relevance to the new STR homepage.
The Rant
Well if I haven’t said this before . . . I despise Internet Explorer. Makes my life as a web developer harder than it has to be. It’s crappy support for CSS forces us to make a page, and then go back and find hacks and workarounds for the way skewed way Internet Explorer implements CSS.
The Tips
Luckily, I found a couple tools that help out the whole testing/debugging process. TredoSoft has some tools that allow multiple versions of Internet Explorer to be installed on Windows XP. This makes it easier to test pages on all the versions of IE that the audience might use. IE7 has gotten better as far as CSS support is concerned, but still not up to par with standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
The Relevence to the New STR Homepage
The feature in the new homepage that Internet Explorer (both IE6 and IE7) chokes on is the CSS rollover menu for creating new threads and creating calendar events. I’ve gotten cross browser support for that type of rollover to work on a different website so this one shouldn’t be too hard.
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