Sunday 6 May 2012

Coding on a Sunday night

It's a quarter past twelve on a Sunday evening and I'm sitting here blogging and coding. I really should be in bed right now, my alarm is due to go off in a little over 5 hours. But the fact is that I am enjoying myself. The database for the new website has had a few minor changes this evening. Most of this is not because of any redesign as such, but because of me forgetting to include a few key parts of the website. I should have done a proper project plan before starting, but hey, I'm a developer, not a project manager. I know this is completely the wrong attitude if we look at all the books on building websites. There are certain rules that everybody is supposed to follow. But the fact is that many of the websites that we use on a day to day basis do not follow this. They are the sorts of projects that are developed in code as fast as they are developed in the head of the person that is coding them.

So where are we at? I have the database there, with a few parts still missing (the scripts are coded, but the columns and tables themselves are not there yet. I will be putting them in later, and they are definitely in mind when I'm working on the front end!). I also have a few pages, and parts of pages for the new site.

The security has been taken care of, although at this time I am not entirely sure whether I am going to rebuild the security side of things myself. At the moment, I am reluctant to do so, as the project already has the standard MVC security there and I have no users on the site. It may be changed in the future, but not now. The pages I do have are slowly taking shape. I am concentrating on the front end user interface at the moment. The CSS is taking shape and I am testing against Google Chrome and Internet Explorer just to make sure that it all works. Of all of the Internet browsers, Internet Explorer is the one that I have had the most trouble with during my career. IE has always had trouble keeping up with certain Internet standards which have been adopted early by the likes of Google Chrome and Firefox, so much of the front end testing will be against IE. Looking at the stats from my other blog, I will be needing to make sure that I have tested against several versions of IE. For this, I am using IETester, a great program that allows you to test the front end of a site in multiple versions.

I am also thinking about the front end from a mobile browser perspective. Any site these days needs to have mobile support as many of the potential page hits will be from a mobile source. This needs a little more investigation as it is not something I have really had to deal with before.

Back to the coding!

As a side-note, I am leaving the Foo Fighters alone for tonight, and using one of the other motivational tools that I have to hand... I don't know quite what it is about The Social Network that gets me motivated, but it never fails to get me in the mood to create something!

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