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.

Sheesh, it’s already been almost three weeks since my last post.  Good thing no one reads this thing.

Anyway, a slew of updates for qrisper.com.

• totally redesigned the layout…well, not really.  Just got rid of the image tabs and combined the center columns.  I spent so much time making those tabs though…oh well.  I’ve been meaning to get rid of them…just couldn’t get myself to do it.  I think the site looks cleaner and more open.
• also changed the content, design and navigation of the logged in pages.  The question page contains one question and a bunch of your recently answered questions.  Still trying to add the answers of the people you follow.  I’m basically ripping off Twitter.  But hey, whatever works right?
• added a feedback tab to give it more of a presence.  Hopefully, users will hear the feedback tab beckoning for feedback and do its bidding.
• fixed the user thumbnail uploader.  So you can upload pictures of yourselves into qrisper.  Hooray!  Problem was that I was trying to insert the image path into a mySQL table when I should have been updating the table.  Duh.
• built out the account settings page.  Now you can update your info, password and profile pic.  Still working on the functionality that will autopost your answers to Twitter.
• built out the find and follow people page.
• added the timestamp of when you answered the question.  That was one major pain in the ass.  Could not for the life of me figure out the proper syntax for the mySQL query.
• last but not least, I create profile pages for each user.  Whereas before you could only see your own activity, you can now peruse other users’ answers and questions.  Much easier than I had expected.

With all of that accomplished, I felt pretty good for like a minute.  But there’s still so much that I need to do.  I want to integrate Facebook Connect and create a FB page for qrisper.  Need to get the Twitter post working.  Also need to add a few more navigational features and content.  But I finally feel like I’m getting close to an official launch.  Been thinking long and hard about how to approach that.  Just gotta do it I guess.