For the none of you that frequent this blog, I’m sure you’ve noticed the change to the design.  For some reason, Wordpress themes felt so foreign to me.  But I wasn’t feeling the one I had before.  So I decided to take a crack at building a theme that incorporated the look of qrisper.  Wasn’t too bad…just had to navigate through all of the Wordpress PHP.      Actually learned a couple of things about managing browser discrepancies by looking at how theme developers dealt with them.

Which brings me to IE7.  At some point, qrisper got totally broken on IE7.  Ended up using the * hack in my CSS files, which now won’t validate.  To that I say fuggem.  Rules are meant to be broken.

The development theme for the past week was spring cleaning.  I consolidated a number of pages, modularized my CSS (as much as I could), cleaned up and moved all my js files to the footer and tidied up all of my control/view files after the redesign.  qrisper just feels lighter to me now, although there wasn’t any noticeable improvement in performance.

A couple of new/updated pages:

• created a personalized 404 page…heard it’s a good thing to have
• redid the splash page screenshots after the layout redesign…but need to redo them yet again
• added Disqus comments to all answer pages.  I had comments in the pre-alpha version of qrisper but took them out because of poor site.  Still kinda slow but the ability to sign in via Facebook Connect was irresistable.  Too bad that ain’t working…can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong
• Tweaked my existing autocomplete functionality…basically made it look nicer.  Only thing missing now is to add keyboard navigation functionality.

Next up on my list is security and validation.  I’m already using sanitize classes to filter out all user input but I want to add additional layers of security.  Also want to incorporate jquery into the validation process so that users have a clear sense of what’s going on.

Woo!  Two major accomplishments, both for qrisper and myself.

I finally figured out how to post qrisper answers to Twitter.  Users now have the option to auto-post all of their qrisper answers onto Twitter.  A small step for some but a giant leap for Jungkind.

Also finally figured out the correct MySQL query that displays on your question page your submitted answers plus the answers that your followees submitted.  The key piece that I was missing…parentheses.  Blerg.  Think I need to more schooling on PHP and MySQL.

My next intended major tasks were going to be a qrisper app on Facebook and learning how to use Amazon Web Services.  However, I decided that I had nothing compelling to offer Facebook at the moment.  So that has been pushed back.  As for AWS, I’ve discovered that implementing qrisper in the cloud might be a tad complex for me at the moment.  Going to need a systems engineer to manage that for me.

Here are some additional updates:

• minor tweaks to the follow/do not follow functionality
• added a list of newly suggested questions into the suggest question page (for registered users)
• updated my php version of the sitemap but removed that page althogether and am now using an xml version
• with all of recent redesigns to the current layout, I had neglected the admin pages.  Those pages are now macking the new look
• added a list view for skipped questions (in addition to the current top ten view)

I also fixed the category navigation in the splash page so that clicking on a specific category will keep you in that category question pool.

I had been getting some comments that the color scheme in qrisper was a bit noisy.  It might simply be personal taste (I like loud, bright colors) but I decided to tone it down a notch.  The one thing I cannot back down from is the yellow background.  I’ve tried different colors but so far haven’t been able to find one that maintains the qrisper vibe.  Think the new creamier yellow looks pretty good.