Dev Diary - Dez
Dez was landed with the tech end of grabagaff. Below are his sparse, poorly written and constantly misspelled thoughts(just like his coding come to think of it!)
01/06/2004
Dear Diary, today I was asked to help build a web-site of the likes this country has never seen! I jumped up and down and up and down and then up and then down...
02/06/2004
Dragged kicking and screaming from my lovely bed to begin work on grabagaff version 2. Beginning to miss sleep...
05/06/2004
Database is designed, have some design ideas... lots of grey as usual ;)
10/06/2004
Choose backpage as grabagaff's content management system. No surprise there really - using anything else would be suspect seeing I wrote the package (self back patting is a form of therapy - I'm currently eating, sleeping and living grabagaff! )
14/06/2004
I'd imagined populating the system would have been child's play and it is - if by child's play you mean working through until 5 in the morning child's play. Poor Kev - Poor poor kev. His fingers are mere stumps. Thank You Dr.Worm for saving us and keeping us sane.
21/06/2004
It seems to be working. Property search is returning the correct values! I declare grabaGaff.com to be in beta.
18/07/2004
Design! Soooo subjective. So so so so so subjective. It was grey. All grey. Now its blue and grey... better... Css and xhtml all validates - the CMS is cleaning everything surprisingly well.
30/06/2004
Homepage design sucked... so I slightly un-sucked it. Watching users interact is so interesting. Revalidated site - changed how linking structure works (will polish the property end to that real soon).
03/06/2004
The annual O'Brien bbq is sponsored by grabaGaff.com. Can't talk - drunk...
06/07/2004
Almost there... almost there... the site is almost 100%... the search works... the CMS is in place and doing its jobs and hits are building... almost there... WAYHEY - a hat tip to the evening echo newspaperfor their piece on us!
11/07/2004
Began work on skinning system - soon users will be able to choose how grabagaff looks! System is still in beta so I'm picking out bugs here and there... but almost there (see last post for amusment!). Google has accepted the site for their adsense banner advertisement system- they said no to my personal webpage (http://www.deziddon.com - so vain me ;)
13/07/2004
Moved the site lock stock and barrel to a shiney new server - loads more speed to play with =)
Added backpage's 404 handler also - will ease the user experience if something nasty happens.
19/07/2004
Writing a piece titled alternate accommodation - click here to give me a hand to give it some punch.
24/07/2004
Alternate accommodation guide (aag) is online. Cheers to fellow forum lurker oddlyaromatic for his input.
31/07/2004
Another year older, another penny poorer...
03/08/2004
A Monday cleverly disguised as a Tuesday... *SHUDDER*! Working on a new article... will post a beta eventually.
11/08/2004
Added a comments system (see the end of this page) so users can comment directly about a particular page on grabaGAFF