ZenLinux Blog

Did just a bit of back-end work this evening, sanitizing input for use with SQL and stripping backslahes from the returned queries.

Things have been slow lately; I’ve caught a nasty head cold and I’m way behind on work I’ve been doing for a state commission report which must be delivered on Nov. 1. I’m still really excited about this project but it’s going to have to take a back seat to some other priorities in the short term.

I’ve posted the newest development snapshot to the demo server, which now allows you to edit any individual quote at will, with all the DHTML/AJAX/spinner goodness you’ve come to expect.

I added a spinner to the add quote form so that when adding a quote, you see it when the database is being updated. Also added some input validation to the quote input form (neither field can be blank).

The Delete links on the quotes disappear immediately when you click on them, to help give feedback that the action was accepted. I’d like to add some sort of fade effect to these Delete links instead, we’ll see how that goes.

Okay, I got the wiki running again. Too busy for much coding tonight.

Argh. My web hosting provider just migrated to a new server, and they’re running PHP5. I think I need to make some minor tweaks to MediaWiki to get it working again, but for now it’s down. Sorry.

Courtesy of the SAJAX library, I now have the deletion of quotes in the quote editor working without a page reload. Update: adding quotes is also SAJAX-ified, and it passed testing in Firefox, IE 6, and Safari. w00t!

I’ve also set up a MediaWiki site which will be updated soon with most of my development notes and ideas.

The demo site which gets updated with the latest development code at least once per week can also be found here.

The “Delete” links in the quote editor now do the fancy javascript show/hide thing, and I’ve turned the Add Quote form into a collapsable one, which does crude validation to check for empty fields on submit. It’s not impressive, but I spent the better part of this past weekend racking my brain about using javascript timers. It has definitely taught me that I have a long way to go to achieve some decent javascript-fu, but I don’t see that as a negative thing.

Now I just need to add the ability to edit quotes in-place, and do some SQL validation on the PHP side of things, and I think I can move on to creating the goal and value editing pages.

I definitely stayed up way too late tonight working on this, but it paid off. Now the “Edit Quotes�? link only appears when you hover over the quote. It’s a bit of javascript trickery with timers and the CSS visibility attribute.

These are the kinds of features that I think will really make this application usable. AJAX is still ahead, but for now, small steps like this still add a bit of polish to the UI.