Third status report
Yes, the third. I’m keeping count (although, with only 3, who couldn’t?). A few things have been finished for a while, but I wanted enough stuff to be worthwhile of a status report. Doesn’t hurt that this practice saves time through writing fewer status reports (although it does make it harder to remember all what I’ve done…).
- Finished the 5th comic.
- Finished: 5
- Sketched: 12
- Scripted: 15
- Translated: 0 (in 0 languages)
- Made a To-Do list
- Got depressed over how much work goes into so few To-Do item(s)
- Finished the comic’s navigation (code, layout integration, making everything work properly…)
- [Admin] Add Transcripts (roughly 40% done):
- Add ‘Characters’ table
- Add ‘Add Character’ function
- Add ‘Translate Character’ function
- [Admin] Add language/translation stuff (roughly 50% done):
- Add ‘Languages’ table
- Add ‘Add Language’
A lot of work went into getting it translation ready. I thought I’d best get it in early, while it’s easier and less work, but I misjudged the amount of additional work it entails and now I’m not sure it’s worth the extra wait. It’s causing the website ‘going public’ date to be pushed back a lot, while I really want to get it out before the end of the year. As an analogy, think of it like this: I had the choice to build a small office now, use it for a bit and while using it build a bigger one later - which would have required the work for two buildings but would’ve allowed me to use the little one for a while. I also had the choice to build a big office right away, saving the time and work it took to build the little office, but in the interim I’d have no office. Because of this… Delay, I guess you could call it, I’m not fully focused on coding PHP and trying to get that out the door as soon as possible. If push comes to shove I can publicize the website with a limited (or even slightly faulty) administration section; I’m the only administrator/translator/… anyway, I know the inner workings of the GSC CMS (GameSphere Comic Content Management System) very well, and I should be able to force stuff through phpMyAdmin if need be.
I’m glad I made the To-Do list. While it showed me the size of my project - an intimidating list of features I’ve yet to implement - it’s also given me clear-cut goals. I’ve more or less listed them in order (which can be done parallel, which must be done after another, etc), even made a little “progress” graphic that I’m slowly filling up. Not nearly as fast as I’d like it to, but I’ll get there.
Coding the navigation was rather easy. The coding I’d provided myself earlier was actually flawless, so there wasn’t any bug-hunting to be done. What I did spent quite a bit of time on was getting the linked images to show up the way I wanted them to: next to each other, no padding, right atop and below the comic. First to remove the image borders, next to have them float:left. I’m still not certain why that would work the way it does (and why it’d have padding when I’ve clearly stated padding:0px) but I’ve never completely gotten CSS. Or perhaps it’s just the browsers that don’t fully implement that correctly. Either way, it’s showing up correctly now in IE7, FF2 and FF3.
Adding the characters table and the languages table was pretty straight-forward. It took a little while designing them but from then on the code was easy. Adding the ‘add language’ function proved a bit more of a challenge - mostly because I had the odd typo here and there - and adding the ‘add character’ function proved to be a true challenge. Juggling variable scopes along with annoying typo’s and even a logic error was quite frustrating. In the end, the most annoying bug (that I’d looked at for several hours) turned out to be as simple as moving one line up above another, outside a foreach loop. In that particular case, I had an if statement, within which there was a foreach, within that another if statement, containing another foreach with another if statement. Combine that with two arrays gotten from a table (one of which re-indexed), both of which used in the foreach (one in each loop) and as itself within the loop, … It was quite hard to keep track and make sense. I don’t think I still understand why it works right, now, but I do know it works exactly as I’d intended - although clearly not with as simple code as I’d imagined or hoped.
Barring any more of these hour(s)-long bug hunting, I think I’ll be ready ahead of schedule. Another two weeks should more than do it… I hope.
