Kilg.us – Fantasy Stat Tracker …Tracker

Things are proceeding well with the migration of Kilg.us to a new host. The cloud server is up, the web server is installed, database server configured, postfix installed, SSH/SFTP running. I’ve even migrated the codebase with success, although it is all still running on the old Kilg.us database. Tomorrow I hope to get the database copied over and see how things work.

For tomorrow I have moved the CRON job that mails daily boxscores to the new server. An initial test of it was successful. I’m optimistic that tomorrow morning everyone that wants boxscore emails should receive them.

While it may seem that very little has been happening around here lately, there has actually been a flurry of activity. Unfortunately, very little of that activity has included any new code for the stat-tracker.

The majority of my time lately has been spent improving my development environment. I’ve moved from text editors for code authoring to a full-featured IDE: Eclipse with the PHPEclipse plug-in. I’ve also added a source-control repository (Subversion) with TortoiseSVN to allow versioning of files and efficient roll-back should I seriously screw something up down the road. Lastly, I’ve setup a local virtualhost on my development box to allow me to author and test code on my local machine before pushing anything to the production website. All things considered, I have no idea why I didn’t set this all up last year!

Just about the only code change in the last few days was an alteration to how included scripts are located on the server when a page is processed. Basically, the site used to have a hard-coded set of directories in which to look for included scripts. This was fine in my old development process that basically involved pushing files to the production server to test.  Now that I have a local server, though, I need a separate set of include directories because my local system and the production website system don’t have identical file structures. I’ve added some simple logic to check what environment the code is running in (my local machine or the production server) and define include paths based on that. It’s not an elegant solution, but considering the limited capabilities of the production web server (no php.ini or .htaccess configuration for include paths), it works.

Now that I seem to be getting my development environment settled, hopefully the coming days will see some more visible and substantive changes to Kilg.us.

Another day, another FTP issue. Again limited to the functionality (and horrible usability) of the hosting provider’s File Manager, I focused primarily on visual design and style. I’m not enthralled with my current design, but at least it’s some progress. I spent a few hours working in Photoshop today creating visual elements then writing out the stylesheet.

With all my development projects I start my styling by writing as close to the W3C standard as possible and using Firefox (with Firebug) for testing. Down the line, I’ll flush out the styles to ensure compatibility with IE7, Safari, and Konqueror. At this point, IE6 has brought my life so much stress and turmoil that I have no intention of supporting it.

Tomorrow won’t offer much time for development on the Fantasy Stat Tracker, so I’ll probably continue to work on minor visual elements. The next functionality development tasks will include creating user accounts and teams and editing those items. Hopefully that will be in place before the end of the weekend.

The FTP server for the Fantasy Stat Tracker has been down for most of the evening, making it quite difficult to update the site. I did manage to update the homepage using the clumsy File Manager application included by the hosting company. That’s not an experience I wish to repeat, though. I’ve begun to investigate other hosting options for this and all my other sites. My current host runs slow, often has down-time, costs too much, and its webmail clients randomly logs me out…I’m not sure why I’ve stuck with them as long as I have (7 years!).

The only changes to the Fantasy Stat Tracker today are on the homepage. The homepage previously had the “team” display content. I’ve removed that content (it was out-of-date and duplicate of a site sub-page) and replaced it with a simple list of links: Login, Visit the Blog, and Create an Account. Unfortunately, the functionality to create an account doesn’t work yet. Perhaps that is next on the list of things to do.