Ah, so after many hours toiling away at code, I am finished! I am the other guy behind this project, and tonight I added some mundane cool features such as being able to list yourself as the submitter of a question and making that detail appear when someone answers that question! Easier said than done though, especially since I don’t have much experience building websites. I also added some (friendly? threatening?) tips on submitting good questions (part of the reason for this is that some answers were too long … and it drove me insane trying to position the new information to appear in the answer box).
There were some other back-end functions I updated with the database and the table row positioning in the details panel and what it does when you don’t give it a question number and that flash thing that comes up when you submit a question blah blah blah.
Something else we’ve been struggling with (and was an issue this time around, too) is cross-browser compatibility. We primarily use Firefox to view and tweak our pages, but we were dismayed to find that other browsers made our site look like total crap. It took us a couple hours to sort out and fix the problems we could see. The thing is, we’ll have to continue to check up on it after every update so that we don’t have boxes and text in random places. Quite frustrating, if you ask me.
In other news, we got our first big hit! By chance, we attracted the attention of TreeHugger. That’s like, crazy! Actually, we just got the email today, and my cousin and I have yet to discuss this and put together a reply email about our background and how we’re buying the rainforest. And we definitely have to shape up the site. It looks fine (maybe?) and it’s usable, but I know we can do better. It can look better (although I don’t know how …it just can …although I fear it will be a lot of work), and it can have more features like a link at the bottom of the questions so people can copy it and send it to a friend if they think it’s cool. Anyway, I think I will go dance around now, before I fully realize the site needs some hardcore work done on it.
-sketchy guy k
