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.

Decided to take a breather on the php to focus on the interface.  Actually, the php issue was interface related so I guess what I really mean is focus on making qrisper a bit flashier looking.

The landing page was getting a little noisy so I decided to put the registration into a modal window. I used jquery and followed a tutorial from yensdesign.com.  Implementation was pretty straightforward. One thing I want to tinker with is the location of the window.  It looks a bit off-center…I noticed that on the tutorial as well.  If anyone can see the reason why, please holler (code below).

function centerPopup(){

        var windowWidth = document.documentElement.clientWidth;
	var windowHeight = document.documentElement.clientHeight;
	var popupHeight = $j("#popupSignup").height();
	var popupWidth = $j("#popupSignup").width();

	$j("#popupSignup").css({
		"position": "absolute",
		"top": windowHeight/2-popupHeight/2,
		"left": windowWidth/2-popupWidth/2
	});
}

I’m using jquery with prototype so I needed to make sure that I included jquery’s noconflict clause and change the $ variable for all jquery scripts (hence the $j).  There’s so much information out there about jquery that it’s hard not to use it.  But now that I have the power, I need to be responsible and practice restraint.  qrisper’s getting a little large around the waist from overindulging on all of those image files. Found this site on web optimization, telling me that qrisper needs to go on a  diet.

Also added a little feedback button…meh…looks alright.  The button made me realize that I’m digging myself into a trap.  I am maintaining slightly different versions of the same page.  Which version the users see depends on whether or not they’re logged in.  Decided that I could probably use a php if statement to swap out includes depending on whether or not a session id exists.

Wanting to trim the fat further, I went to clean up my css files and optimize them with a few new tricks I learned.  Big mistake that was.  Spent a few hours fixing all of the damage I caused.  I found the tips from David’s old blog.  Actually found a number of good resources…a few of which I used to fix a few issue that had been bugging me.