As the Wheels Turn

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:

• members can record their injury, comment on it, and estimate their recovery time
• members can go back and modify that injury or declare themselves ready to ride
• list of all currently injured and recently recovered riders + links to PM the injured persons for sending words of encouragement
• history of personal injury

** 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:

1. Firefox (mac)
2. Safari (mac)
3. IE6 (windows)
4. IE7 (windows)

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:

• Pretty: gonna try a few more color combos and such to see what will make the page more pleasing to the eye and more user friendly
• Ad play: gonna play with ad integration to see what would work best.
• Strip and PHP: Take out header and footer html and stick that in a PHP function. Then call the function on any page that uses that header and footer. This will give me a central place to control the header/footer of the entire site - making upkeep a bit easier.

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.

Every now and then I’ll write down little ideas that could possibly make STR as a website and as a community better. There is a ‘fake’ homepage that I use to test out those ideas on, it’s currently at: http://www.socaltrailriders.org/ducks/

The main goal of this new test page is to give the members a more personalized homepage and a more enjoyable experience on STR.

When logged in, the homepage changes in many ways for a member of STR:

• A welcome box in the upper right displays:
  • # of unread PM’s
  • # of unread posts
  • # of thanks earned
  • quick links to view photos, view albums, and create new albums
• The What is STR box disappears
• Checkmarks on threads that the member has posted in
• quick links to create threads and events

The new fake page is still being tinkered with and the changes might or might not go on the live page yet. Feel free to check back on it every once in awhile to get a preview to what the STR homepage might become. Again, the link is: http://www.socaltrailriders.org/ducks/

edit: Internet Explorer chokes on the menu’s for creating threads and making calendar events. That’s a work in progress to ensure cross-browser compatibility.

The 2007 Pow Wow this past weekend was a lot of fun. I tried the Counting Coupe for the first time and reached my goal of finishing (53rd @ 7:18)!

There’s been tons of awesome photos being posted by Winston, Bret (guero), Keith (keith b), Craig (calepic), Dean (dstepper), Jason (mtnbikej), and a few others.

In addition, some of the riders/racers have recovered enough to share their pow wow stories with us.

Here is a collection of links with Pow Wow photos, recaps, and results:

• Photos
• Recaps
• Results

A few of my own photos:

SAR_boats posted something in general discussion which some people proclaimed as the post of the year. And yet the year is so young!

 Link to the post

I don’t have anything against roadies but I must admit I found it pretty funny.

A few of you already know that last week I became the proud new owner of an Apple Macbook. Here’s a quick rundown on a few stats:

• 2.0Ghz Core2Duo
• 2gb RAM
• Superdrive
• 80gb hard drive

If you’re asking yourself what this has to do with STR well it’s not directly connected to STR much. However, it will make my life easier when updating STR or doing other work on it. Plus, it does say “STR, bikes, and life” in the subtitle. This is part of life, isn’t it?

So I’ve made the switch from blogger to wordpress for the As the Wheels Turn blog. A couple reasons motivated me to do this. First and foremost wordpress works well with a journal program I’m now using. This allows me to update the blog very easily and quickly. I have also been curious about wordpress for some time and and wanted to try them out.

So let me know if you like this better then the old blog. Should I change the theme of this blog? Any input is appreciated.

Anybody remember the trail map that used to be on STR? Something along those lines will be coming back soon. But this time it’ll be useful, work well, and frankly will kick ass. I plan to have it include categories for markers. Possible categories are trailhead (duh), meet spots (i.e. ridge park, canyon vistas, etc), and post ride grub spots (i.e. wahoo’s, cook’s, etc). Each marker will have a detailed bubble when clicked on along with a small photo.

Stay tuned.

Sleeping In

So I slept in again today. There were a couple rides going on, one at Holy Jim/Trabuco and the other in Aliso but I didn’t set my alarm last night. Figured if I woke up early for some strange reason I would go ride. Ended up waking up close to 11 am. The poison oak on my right knee got a bit better overnight.

Photo Gallery Software Update

Soon after breakfast I went to tackle the photo gallery update for STR. This is what’s new in this version:

. Improved search results – everything moved into search.php, results saved to db to save on paging through searches and having to “re-search” every page load

. New Profile section includes tabs showing profile info (user can customize using BB codes), photos and comments
. Forum thumbnail link bb code on showphoto (shows a linked thumbnail to the showphoto page)
. AJAX additions:
. Add / Remove from Favorites
. Notify / Remove from notification
. Open Close photo for comments
. Stick / Unstick photo
. Subscribe / Unsubscribe to gallery
. Improved showmember page – significant query reduction displaying last photos
. Some changes to templates to improve layout – removed alternate template directory
. User set Album intro, album titles, on/off
. User set Album default layout (puzzle, gallery, thumbnail, etc)
. Users viewing a category (new option in Show Gallery options)

So I do the usual: backup the databases and proceed with the upgrade. Ran into some issues first time around, restored the backup, and tried again. Second time worked.

My personal favorite new feature is the ‘linked thumbnail’ line under the photos. Copy paste that into a post and it’ll stick the thumbnail of the photo in your post and link it to the gallery. I want to modify it so the thumbnail it shows is the medium sized one (600px wide) and links to the full sized version. I’ll work on that customization later today. Once I get that customization done I’ll delete the “bbcode” line which is inferior to ‘linked thumbnail’ line and would just add unnecessary clutter.

UPDATE: Did the customization and it works how I want it to now. The linked thumbnail code posts the medium version of a photo and links to the full-size version.