the second phase

So I finally got the galleries going and I think I’ve gotten them to integrate into the site well enough.  I had contemplated messing with some of the flickr additions but I’m not sure I want to bother with that.

I’ll try and write up a few paragraphs about what I had to do to accomplish it but it’s 1 in the morning and I gotta go golfing tomorrow morning!

Alot of my time recently at work has been delegated to working on an internal tool that I wrote a long, long time ago.  When I originally created the tool ( which, by the way, is for task tracking/project management ) - I wrote it mainly as a lesson in XML/XSLT creation.  It wasn’t anything I ever intended to maintain.

Oops.

Now I’m left with this stinky pile of garbage code that I wrote, with a ‘It looked good at the time’ interface.  Unfortunately, my boss loves it.  Mainly because the part that does work - generating our weekly status reports - is all he cares about.

So once I started maintaining it, I realized just how awful XML/XSLT is and what a pain in the royal ass it is to do anything flexible in it.  So I started converting all the pages back to pure php pages.  Then, about half way through, I discovered jquery ( que light shining from heavens ) and started integrating some of that into the pages to make it more friendly.

Once I had started doing that, I realized how bad I am at organizing CSS files and styles and I’ve gotten so bored with this project that I haven’t bothered to go back and fix them.

What this all means, however, is that I’ve ended up with a project that, at the moment, is half XML/XLST, half pure php, with jquery integrated some places and pure javascript in others, with some disorganized CSS files laying around ( in some cases, I got so sick of styles I started putting them inline in the page.. oops. ) and generally this badly organized, badly coded mess of crap.

And that brings me to my final point - I put it up on phase2! I’ve no idea why I did this - if only to show you how (not) glorious my work is.  But then it turns out that my provider doesn’t have php5, which means I didn’t have access to mysqli.  Then combine that with security things they threw in the mix and I had a whole mess of new bugs.  I worked through them tonight and the page seems, for the most part, up and running.

So if you’d like to, check out my status, project management, task tracking tool here: http://www.phase2.net/status/

I made two logins ( oh yeah, I had to rip out all the LDAP stuff I had put in because we use it at work and change the DB around to use regular passwords ):

Login: admin, Password: admin

Login: jsmith, Password: jsmith

In all honesty, if someone finds this thing useful and wants it, by all means - let me know.  I’ll answer any questions you may have on it and help you if you run into some awful code issue of mine, but I doubt any one is going to want this thing.

And the funny thing is, I still have to keep improving it at work.  Oy.

upgraded the site to the latest wordpress, let me know if you see any issues.

One other thing that I’d like to mention is that I’ve been helping out on an open-source project called ClockingIT. It’s written in Ruby on the Rails framework, which until now, I didn’t really know anything about. It’s been alot of fun, however, and the lead guy on the project is an awesome fellah. Hopefully some of my patches make it into future revisions!