I don’t know if this is how it works for other people but the less I think about a problem, the faster I can find a solution for it.  It’s like anytime I try to figure out a problem through sheer will and forceful brain flexing, I’m left beaten and frustrated.  But take a game break, surf the web or complete forget about the problem for a few days and the next time I approach the problem, it’s like it never was one.  Further evidence that procrastination is the method of creative geniuses?

Anyway, I made a number of breakthroughs during the past few weeks in my quest for the most frickin amazing website on the planet.  First off, I’m definitely getting more comfortable with ajax, as you can see from the registration validation that I’ve set up.  Never in my life did I think I’d be able to create a username and email check.  That was a great moment…(wipes away a tear). Thanks to yensdesign.com, Roshan’s Blog and the professor.

Another pain in the ass was pagination.  I tried a number of techniques found here, here and a few others.  But either I couldn’t get it working or simply didn’t like the implementation.  Finally decided on a pretty simple version of the existing pagination code that I was using.  One thing I’d like to add is the ability to dynamically hide page links when there are too many…hoping that will come to me eventually.

I’m finally making some headway in using mod-rewrite to take control of my urls.  All of the user profile pages can now be access through qrisper.com/username/.  Shout out to Stack Overflow, one frickin great resource.  Planning to use mod-rewrite across all of qrisper.com.  One concern is what kind of performance hit I’m taking using htaccess.  Will need to move that over to the Apache config file eventually.

In addition, a few other minor modifications:

• sanitized 99% of qrisper.com… there’s one or two pages that still need a thorough scrubbing but hoping to have eliminated most of the possibility for any funny business
• users can now change their previously submitted answers
• a few design/nav tweaks (tweet answer link, what’s your answer link, updates to answers/skipped/index pages

And lastly, I was using this solution to manage thumbnail images from the always helpful folks at nettuts.  But at point, I broke it.  Plus, I wasn’t complete satisfied with the quality of the thumbnails.  So now I’m using the ridiculously awesome Smart Image Resizer by Joe Lencioni.

That was a meaty update.  Next up, a city filter for local questions on qrisper.com!

Update: Ha, speaking of which…In Defense of Distraction.

Spent a good chunk of time this week putting together the admin pages for qrisper.   There’s a lot going on back there!  I’ve gained a new appreciation for the folks that developed all of the admin pages that I’ve utilized over the years.  Actually, the one’s at JPM were crappy as hell.  Admin pages never got any love over there.

Working on these pages and seeing the data flowing through gave me some more ideas for user incentives.  More on that in a future posts.

Anyway, here are a few more enhancements:

• after logging in, clicking on the logo now takes you back to the splash page, without logging you out.  Once I change the question and answer interface for both sides, not sure if this will still be necessary.  But more than one person asked for it so there you go.
• after a lot of procrastinating, finally put together a decent FAQ page.  The FAQ page got a decent amount of hits so I needed to get on that.  The remaining pages should follow shortly.
• don’t think anyone noticed (since no one used the feedback form in qrisper.com to provide feedback) but that link was fixed.
• also fixed a problem where clicking on the “get password” submit button wasn’t pushing out the email with the user’s id and pw.
• been dipping my toes into modifying the .htaccess file and minifying js and css for site speed optimization.  Not sure if I’m doing something wrong or my site just isn’t big enough, but I don’t see much of a difference.

Also hit a bit of a milestone this week.  I wrote my first line of original php code to solve a problem.  Woohoo!  Up until now, I’ve been recycling Amos’ code.  Baby steps.

Ajax is staring me in the face right now.  Need to figure out a way to tackle that bastard.