I’ve recently completed a new site (well a first draft version of it anyway). It’s a site that people can join to compete against each other to see who can lose weight and be the “biggest loser” amongst their friends.

Hopefully it will be a good motivation and a bit of fun for those that sign up. Heaps of my friends and family have signed up and I can’t wait to beat them all. (I am so far btw!)

Check it out over at http://www.ourbiggestloser.com.

So I’m currently spending my time working on those new ideas but also all the other things I have planned for the software. Quite mysterious I guess?

The site is for Online hosted theatre ticket management. My software enables theatres to manage the sale of their tickets to their performances for their productions. It’s in the early stages as I mentioned but I do have a customer using it right now to manage their ticket sales and it’s going really well. I have heaps of ideas for the product and I’m not afraid of the competitors (which to be honest i have only recently discovered properly! meh!).

I’ll do a big reveal when the time is right – it’s only 60% of what it can be so far and no front marketing page so I’m Mum’s the word for now.

I’ve been trying to think of what I could show and the hard thing for me is knowing what level to start at – it’s not very interesting starting from the basics but then I don’t want to jump into something that is too complex either.

So for now I’m going to make this post and if anyone reads it and they have a particular thing they would be interested in knowing how to do with VBA in Excel then leave me a comment and I will provide a tutorial (provided I can do what they have asked!)

I’m still heavily into that project that I mentioned in my previous post but I’d be happy to spend the hour or whatever it will take to do a quick tutorial on VBA because I would love to share VBA’s awesomeness with other people and take the occasional break from this app I am developing.

The worst thing about this stage of developing something new is the fact that I can’t get enough done in one day! I want it to be a reality right now but instead I have to spend all this time developing it.

As usual I have started with the aspects that I am most afraid of.. and these have worked out brilliantly! I’ve been working on this for 3 days now and I am very happy with how it is going but unfortunately it will be at least another 60 odd days before I might be anywhere near finished. The more I think about this the more I realise there is to do! But I’m really excited and hopeful that it’s finally going to be my cracker web application that I might actually make some cash off!

What’s more… I’m doing video diaries every night on my progress which I think will make interesting viewing.

So you are developing a new site and you are in the final stages – you’ve already deployed a good working version of the site to the net but you find that you are still needing to make code changes to fix a few little things or enhance etc. So if you are anything like me you are working on a WAMP server on your PC and the site is something like http://localhost/site-name.

In the footer section of your site though you have already deployed the Google Analytics code snippet. Since I understand (and I might be wrong) that Google doesn’t filter out localhost visitors from the stats – you are ruining your stats! Your options are to manually remember to use an alternate footer.php file or manually edit the footer.php file while you are working. I did this once and then realised after a week that the last upload was the alternative footer file and didn’t include the google code. I wasn’t happy at the time as I was trying to see how my marketing efforts were going on my brand new site!

The CodeIgniter Solution

1. Create a new view file called something like “google_analytics.php” and paste in just your google analytics code for your site
2. In your basecontroller (recommend you create a basecontroller and extend this for your other controllers) or in your controller(s), put the following code:

   // Check if we want to include google analytics code - ie; if this is production or localhost
$this->view_data['include_google_analytics'] = TRUE;
if (strlen(strstr(base_url(), 'localhost')) > 0)
{
// this is development - don't put in the google analytics code
$this->view_data['include_google_analytics'] = FALSE;
}


3. In your footer.php view file – or whatever you have called yours put in the following code:

<?php
// check if to include google analytics code
if ($include_google_analytics)
{
include 'system/application/views/google_analytics.php';
}
?>


4. Now this footer.php file can go back and forth from development to production and you never have to worry about removing or disabling the Google Analytics code because it will only ever activate when you are not working on localhost

The WordPress Solution

1. Create a new view file called something like “google_analytics.php” and paste in just your google analytics code for your site. Put this file in your template directory.
2. In your footer.php WordPress theme file, paste the following (this needs to go just before the </body> tag):

   <?php
$base_url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if (strlen(strstr($base_url, 'localhost')) == 0)
{
// this isn't development - put in the google analytics code
include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/google_analytics.php' );
}
?>


Of course I probably could have just done the same thing in CodeIgniter but I came up with the CodeIgniter solution many moons ago – well and truly before I ever looked at WordPress.

I showed a colleague of mine (Craig) from my day job (we don’t do anything at all to do with web development/design etc) and he thought it looked OK as well and showed his wife (Cath) who happens to be… a … designer of course! And I was told that she had some advice she would send through to me after work.

She sent me her feedback and advice later that night and it was really fantastic! The biggest points from a design perspective that I got out of her email was that it’s a good idea to align all your content down from a single point to help the reader’s eyes follow the page content. So if there is a title in the banner and a title in the content and some body etc – the left hand sides of all of these should be aligned. Amazing what a difference this makes too!

I had also asked her about some ideas around varying fonts for h1, h2 tags and body and she provided some good pointers there too. I had already gathered from other research that it’s nice to have serif fonts for titles and sans-serif for body and I happened to have coincidentally already decided on Georgia for titles and Verdana for body for Michelle’s site.

Cath spent what I can only assume to be a generous amount of her time creating a mock-up of the home page in her way. I agreed it looked better than what I had done so I changed these aspects of the design across all pages. Below are two screen shots – the original Al Boyd (not a designer) and then the Cath (professional designer).

Michelle's site - Designer's Touch

Michelle's Site - Al Style

Sadly my cute vertical menu on the right is gone

WordPress Site for Michelle

After having truly “discovered” the power of WordPress I was pretty keen to do another site with it. So this is my first site with WordPress that is for someone else. I am just as impressed with WordPress after this site as I was when I used it to re do my site.

Comedy Tragedy Masks

Considering my design skills are normally pretty ordinary (and I might be delusional here) I think this site turned out really nice! The big design aspect which I had to work with was the image of Michelle in the banner but the rest of the site I designed myself. I even took some scraggy Comedy/Tragedy masks from somewhere out there on the internet and traced over just some of the facial features to create a useful and appropriate blog post divider image

I’m looking forward to working on another one of these – in the meantime I’m going to play around and figure out some more cool things that can be done with WordPress.