party.traas.org

party.traas.org -- your source for party info at Aaron's place!

Welcome, friends. As many of you know, I have frequent gatherings at my place. The purpose of these can be to pray, party, record music, play games, or just plain hang out. Many people ask for directions to my place or information about such gatherings, so I built a simple web page months ago. Well, it didn't meet my needs.

First, It was ugly. Really ugly. And hard to maintain. And it was one page -- you got all the information or nothing. Also, I needed an easy way to post pictures and other media for download related to an event. Finally, my method of managing invites was primitive and non-portable -- I kept a text file on the desktop of my work PC (that's where I read most of my email) and I'd update it manually. So, unless I remembered to email it to myself, I had no way of seeing it at home. Then there were problems with version skew, etc. You get the picture...

The beauty of technology

Using simple and free technologies, namely the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database (and the most excellent Quanta Plus web IDE), I am in the process of automating this site. Currently event info is stored in a database. Soon, invite info will as well. You will soon be able to do RSVP's by web, and get pictures relating to the event you attended the next day.

Status

Well, the initial page design is pretty decent -- almost to where I want it. The problems with the design are as follows:

• Fix bizzare scaling bug related to PNG hack in MS Internet Explorer.
• Some font sizes are wrong on MS Internet Explorer.

The database-driven content management system is in early stages. Here's what I currently have done:

• Database tables are created and populated for events, pictures, and media.
• The events page displays nothing if no argument is given in the URL.
• The URL for an event is obscured using MD5 hashes encoded in hex. This means that no one who is not invited to an event will be able to easilly figure out the URL to the event info.

The following is what I'd like to get done in the near future:

• Add database tables and entries for people I invite.
• Build a system for constructing email invites automatically and sending them.
• Build a system where an invitee may RSVP via the web, and update thier status at any time.
• Build a system where an invitee can query the system for any events they may be invited to, and it will be sent to them via email.
• Integrate into Google Maps using their recently published API. If you haven't used this tool, you really should try it.

Updates:

• The title bar is now 4 elements: the background image, the cards, and the two sets of text. All of the positioning is done via CSS. Previously, it was all one large image. This should cut down on page load times measurably, and makes the whole thing look loads better without the stylesheet, and in text-only browsers like Lynx. (8/26/05)
• All pages now validate as XHTML 1.1. (8/24/05)
• Converted icons to 8-bit PNG's, so MS Internet Explorer renders these properly. (8/24/05)
• Fixed 1 pixel alignment error in MS Internet Explorer. (8/24/05)
• Fixed bottom element position/size. (8/24/05)
• Removed a bunch of dead links. (8/22/05)