PatCavit.com

Things are getting exciting around here as summer winds down. It’s always the busiest time of the year, all those projects that got shoved aside for more interesting or pressing projects are back at the forefront. Most also have just a few days left before they have to be done as well, just to add some extra excitement to the mix.

I’ve almost completed the whole new Surveys interface, it’s even more complex than Answerline in terms of Javascript interactivity. It’s much easier to do stuff the proper unobtrusive way now that I’ve had practice, but working within the old DB structure makes parts of it more tricky than they should be. Making the pretty interface play nicely w/ the backend and fleshing out whole display/collect info stuff is for next week when I want to avoid boring staff training stuff. I’ll work on creating another animated GIF or something of the Surveys interface once it’s a little more polished. It’s pretty slick, but not so much of a deviation from old Surveys as I made with Answerline. It’s more the logical next step given the newer, more powerful tools available.

Just finished up the login stuff for FreshStart, definitely needs some prettying but as far as I’m aware my part is pretty much done.

Keys now uses CAS for logins, it was the last holdout trying to use the broken hacking LDAP method. The keys interface is so wonky that I have no real idea how it’s supposed to work which made it pretty tough to test. I think it’s working, but hell if I know! Part of the weirdness is the insistence on using Javascript links to change the page’s location. That was some sort of bizarro trademark of an old programmer who was here before my time, and I’d really love to hear the justification for it. This was obviously done before unobtrusive Javascript became popular. If you tried using Keys without JS enabled it’d just be a bunch of links to ‘#’, not the most useful thing in the world.