Week 6 - Race to the Finish

Monday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours
Thursday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours

Total - 59.5 hours


Week 6 was the sprint to the finish before the start of UXI on Monday the 23rd. Having a week off gave me the chance to let my frustration cool off and develop a clearer plan in my head. Monday morning I started by creating an itemized list of all the remaining tasks and sorted them roughly by priority. I moved ahead by attempting to answer the questions I left off with last time:

• Speakers will have individual logins and will be able to post to 3 categories (announcements, logistics, and happenings) which will be automatically pulled onto the homepage
• Attendees (and therefore, general public) will be able to view all content besides the slidedecks without password protection
• Commenting will be enabled for any home page postings and will not require WP registration, hopefully creating some sense of social networking/communication
  

Deciding to axe the login/password restriction system was certainly a painful one, considering how much work went into creating a functional system in the first place. I do however think that it was a prudent one, and will result in a better overall user experience in the long run. It certainly was a tradeoff between choosing silent password protection or user commenting.

I spent the rest of Monday afternoon testing the site on PC browsers. This is something I'd normally do at home but my testing PC recently contracted a virus and proceeded to completely erase itself (thank you Microsoft), so I had to wait until I was in the office to do my testing.

Firing up the old, crusty PC reminding me of how much I don't miss working with Windows. The first screen I was greeted with was all-black with a white mono-spaced message that read: "Keyboard error... press F1 to continue." I wonder if the developer ever realized the irony of that message.

Debugging went surprisingly well. Normally I check periodically on IE6 while I build out to avoid any possible train-wrecks. This was the first time that I had completely built out a site before testing, essentially flying blind. Miraculously, I only had one bug to trace and achieved a solid layout all the way back to IE5--a small miracle.

Thursday I came in to finish up the remaining items, mostly small and repetitive details. I created all the user accounts for the AP staff and sent out an email, urging them to fill in existing content gaps. Finished constructing the category/archive page templates and enabled, styled, and tested user commenting. Spent an hour or two exchanging emails with Verba attempting to understand the ever-complicated .htaccess system, in order to password protect the slidedecks, and finally got it working.

On Friday, I took care of a few last details at home, making sure that the site was ready to go live.

It's go time...

Week 5

Out of town - more to come next week

Week 4

Monday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours
Thurs - 8am-4pm - 8 hours

Total - 41.5 hours

I came in to AP twice this week due to the fact that I will be out of town next week. I have the pleasure of traveling with a group of around 50 people to Tijuana, Mexico to collectively build three houses for those who have none in a community-building service project. I came in on Thursday to compensate the lost hours.

Monday was a quiet day. Henning was in Germany visiting family and Brandon was preparing for/giving a virtual seminar online. The vast majority of the day was heads-down work, learning how to accomplish things in Wordpress. I certainly vacillate between equally appreciating Wordpress for it's high level of customization and extendability and loathing it for not thinking like I do.

Thursday I jumped back into the nitty-gritty of building out the site. I spent the morning rifling through the Wordpress codex learning how to use various tags for the custom content-pulling templates.

By lunch, I decided it was time for a little pow-wow with Henning and Brandon. My primary frustration was that so far into the project, I still felt like I (we) didn't fully understand what the speakers and attendees want/need to do with the site, essentially missing the entire point at a place in the timeline where the project should be wrapping up. Another frustration was the fact that due to the technology limits we basically had to choose login/content restriction at the expense of commenting or any sort of individual accounts/communication.

We didn't come up with any profound conclusions/solutions but it was good for me to talk out-loud and attempt to articulate my ideas, mostly for my sake. I concluded by saying that the remaining questions to answer were: What exactly will the speakers want to post and where? and, How do the conference attendees want to communicate/interact with the site/community?

That essentially ended the workday. I was feeling the afternoon slump and took off a little early.

Week 5

Out of town - more to come next week