I’m working away at my Web Design and Development coursework.

Achievements so far

• Registration works. If you omit any of the required data, it will ask you, for example, Are you as ashamed of your town or city as humans should be of their history?
  • I’d like the Address line 2 field to be optional, but the moan-mechanism kicks in if it’s omitted, so the workaround is to make it required.
  • I’d like the ‘register me’ thing to be styled text, not a button – but this is well down the list of requirements.
• Logging in and out work.
  • I’d like the ‘log out’ thing to be styled text too – again nowhere near a priority.
• The footer pages (FAQ, site-use policy, etc) are full of in-character text, while being vaguely useful.
• There are functional ‘mailto’s where relevant. OK, I know I should use forms to avoid spam but who said this site would ever go properly live?
• Errors where the site doesn’t correctly link to the database are trapped by automatically going to appropriate error-message pages, including opportunities to go back to refreshed versions of the recalcitrant pages or to email the webTribble. He or she will be too busy, ahem, making the Tribble with one back to reply, of course.
• Lesson 1 is created. I’ve not yet worked out a way to prevent students from jumping straight to level 6. Currently I have one piece of code for the list of lessons – I guess each lesson will need its own code with the same text but omitting ‘forbidden’ links.
• I’m slightly dreading writing the tests – I fear a combination of AJAX and goodness knows what else will be needed to make these pages mark themselves. As for keeping a running total of honour points – aarrgghh!
• And if you resort to emailing the webTribble from the FAQ page, after all the work I’ve put into it, the email will have an automatic subject I am as stupid as Deanna Troi.

Here’s my bug/things to do list.
Green = squished
Orange = unsquished or not yet attempted, low priority
Red = unsquished or not yet attempted, high priority

1. need line 2 of address to be optional
2. sort error messages
3. correct sideboxes
4. language & culture lessons
5. normal lesson 1
6. normal lessons 2-5
7. culture and history lessons
8. test 1
9. tests 2-5
10. thermometer of honour points
11. E-K dictionary
12. K-E dictionary
13. registered needs screen name
14. sort what happens when duplicate accounts attempted
15. login and assimilate me should be styled text, not buttons

Ah but I’m learning and having fun – can’t be bad!