Blog

Deep into it

The integration with PayPal and the whole ad-buying process is taking longer to create than I anticipated. This is my first e-commerce site, and I keep thinking of new things I need to do, like the “success” page and receipt for after paying for the pixels. If I want to launch this any time soon, I am going to have to do so with limited functionality, and work on the rest after launch. I mean, the customer click report pages are not really needed until there are customers!

My current thinking is to finish the FAQ, do the PixelList page structure (again, don’t need the actual list until someone buys some pixels), and a basic Contact page, then move everything over to the web host and see if it works. Bugger! I still need to figure out how to use the MySQL dump commands to get the Skyline area map data uploaded. No rest for the weary!

Right after launch, the top priority will be modifying the ad-picking code to keep people from buying pixels that overlap existing ads. Then, I need to get the page and click counters running, then I can turn towards displaying the stats on the site. After that, the customer login, reporting, and account editing pages, I think, followed closely by the weekly report e-mail functionality. Man I hope that actually gets used (as in I hope there are customers to e-mail). Along the way, I will be improving the code compatibility with Opera and Firefox, since it’s taking long enough just to get it to work in IE. Interestingly, it seems Opera is closer to IE in how it handles Javascript than Firefox is. I suspect that is because Firefox follows the W3C specification more rigidly.

Later on, I’ll make this page into a proper blog instead of a static HTML page, with the ability for readers to leave comments. Then, after all that, then I get to start adding the fun stuff! Well, as the saying goes, anyplace on Earth is within walking distance, if you have the time…