ZenLinux Blog

After a long hiatus involving the holidays, a nasty flu, and an intense search for another car, Thought2Action development is getting back on track. I have been adding more development notes to the wiki as I get through the iCalendar specification (RFC2445).

I’m noting with some interest the development of TurboGears, a python database-driven web development framework that looks similar in some ways to Ruby on Rails. It would be nice to see that platform mature, becuase I’d definitely prefer to learn python to ruby, and RoR is Ruby’s greatest strength to me right now.

I’ve been busy recently setting up a new server to host this and several other sites. Now we’re hosted on a dedicated server with some serious bandwidth and network flexibility. One thing I did immediately is set up some DNS records to help separate out sections of the project.

Wiki – the wiki is now at http://wiki.zenlinux.com.

Demo site – the demo site is now at http://thought2action.zenlinux.com.

Weblog – the blog can now be found at http://blog.zenlinux.com. Of course, if you’re reading this now, you’ve realized that.

There is going to be a lot more developent action soon, I’ve been reading up on the iCalendar specification and doing backend work necessary to import calendar entries and tasks into the database.

I know, it has been a long time since the last update. I have finally applied the security fix for PHPiCalendar, so the site is back up again. Lots of development will be happening soon. I’ve missed it!

Sorry folks, but I had to take down the demo site temporarily. There was a critical security vulnerability reported today in the PHPiCalendar software (which Thought2Action is based on) and I need to fix that. It shouldn’t take long, but I’m in the middle of some intense Commission report work and Thought2Action is going to have to be on hold a bit longer. After Nov. 1 things should be back to normal.

I managed to squeak in about an hour of development this weekend, and have re-thought the placement of the edit/delete controls in the quote and GV editors. In a blatant ripoff of Backpack, I now use their trashcan icon instead of a text delete link, and have moved the controls to the left side of the objects.

It’s definitely a lot cleaner, but I had to do some nested table work to get the text on the left side of the object. I’d much rather use HTML list items, so if anyone knows how to place text to the left of an li (instead of having it appear on top of the list item), please let me know.

It’s been a discouraging/unproductive weekend, getting to work on this for a short time was very theraputic.

I’ve uploaded a new development snapshot to the demo server. Since there is not yet any way to access the governing value editor (since there are no goals in the system yet), I’ve added a temporary link at the footer of each page to take you directly to the GV editor.

The sample values I added were taken from Ben Franklin’s autobiography. 🙂

All that’s left is to implement the part which raises/lowers a value’s ranking.

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.