Stuck

I've been stuck the past few days with the website. So while I've been waiting to get help from my tutor, I have just been making little changes here and there to the website to make it better. I have been trying to style the form where the dreams are submitted in. I have been playing around with the fonts and colours of the website to try and get the best suitable design possible. I have also made the tag search work properly so when a tag is clicked in the tag cloud the dreams are actually displayed with the tags, where as before just the persons name was being displayed with the tags and no dream, which was pointless.

I have designed in Photoshop, how I have pictured my website to look like. You can view this below:


This has all stemmed from this design that I had thought of at the start of this project. An image of this can be viewed below:

Voting System

I had been struggling to find a voting system tutorial that I wanted to implement on my website. However, this change when I came across this tutorial. I followed the tutorial successfully and got a voting system for the dreams working. The problem I have, is that the system has not been implemented into my website, but works by another file. So I need to merge the two and get the voting system working properly with my website.

The below images shows the voting system being implemented.


I now want to add this system to my website, which you can see in the image below.


As you can see the website is a working progress but I am making good progress. Hopefully I can have the website completed within the next few weeks, so I can concentrate on the report.

Latest

I've been looking desperately to find a voting tutorial that I can use to add to my site but to no avail. I want to do the voting system via AJAX so it doesn't have to reset the page when updating, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. I'm also struggling to find a tutorial on a flagging system. This is quite worrying as I don't have long left to complete the website so I really need to get a move on.

The list I have thought to myself that I have left to finish the website is this:

1. Complete the voting system.
2. Complete the flagging system.
3. Complete the pagination.
4. Complete the design.
   

The Joys of Boredom!

After being bored the other night I decided to add the comment section to the main part of the website (as it was a separate script before). This was a bit fiddly and took some editing of code. To do this also I had to get rid of the pagination on the dreams. I'm not sure why to be honest, but it didn't work with it, so I thought it would be better to have the comment system in place rather than some pagination. I will work on the pagination over the next week or so.

I have also been bored tonight with nothing to do so decided to work on the design of the site. I had the idea of clouds because when people used to dream in old cartoons clouds would appear above their heads. This has stuck with me from the off so I wanted to keep this theme with the site. I was also influenced by last years Disney movie Up. This is where an old man flies his house with a bunch of balloons attached to it. The film was very colourful and looked amazing. So I thought of someone holding a balloon flying through the sky. I also added a rainbow. There wasn't much reason for doing this apart from it was colourful. Here's what I came up with.

Comment away!!

After many, many, many hours of brain scratching, stress and anger, I have finally got my comment system working. The comments system allows users to add comments to each different dreams. On the homepage it will display a link that shows the word "Comments" and then showing a number in brackets displaying how many comments that dream has, for example "(3)". When a user clicks this link it will take them to a page that displays the dream on it' own with no other dreams. Then all the comments that have been written will be displayed. (Just thinking about this now, I may need to add pagination to the comments system). Underneath the comments then is a form that allows people to add more comments. The comments are being submitted into a database via the form, and then the script is pulling the comments from the database and displaying them on the page.

I followed this tutorial which you can view here that was shown to me by my friend Scott Llewellyn. I had to alter a lot of the code because it wasn't working as it should have been. I had to change all the "&lt;" and ">" to "<" and ">" because this stopped the whole script from working properly. Obviously I also had to edit the code to suite my database and names etc. I had many problems with this script and had to get help from PHP Freaks Forum to help me with them. I have to acknowledge that people have helped me with this and cannot say I did it all on my own because that would be untrue. I don't think I would have been able to solve the problems without the help if I'm truly honest. However, from the help I have received, I can see where I have gone wrong and have learnt from this. The comment system I have in place at the moment is in a file on it's own and so I now need to get it integrated with the actual website itself so it can fit in with the whole design and workings of the website.

I have know got two of the three major parts of the website working which has been great progress throughout the month of January. I have learnt a lot during this time, and probably spent the most time of my life coding and practicing web work, which I have thoroughly enjoyed. Once I have added the comment system to the website I must then move on to the ratings system for the website.

"Tag clouds are the work of the devil"

The title was a quote taken from myself. As you may have guessed I have been struggling with carrying out the tag cloud feature on my website. But at last I have made a major breakthrough. To start the day off I thought I would need to change the table in the database that I had set up and so decided to delete the table. Then after setting up the new table (losing all the entries that I had submitted in the process) and it did not work, breaking the website in the process I thought I had made a major mistake. I ended up deleting the new table that I had made and created the same table that I started with. So after alot of frustration and wasted time, I just couldn't figure out how to get the tag cloud script working properly. I then posted my code on the website of the tutorial I was following, which can be found here. The guy who wrote the tutorial, Andrew Johnson, helped me out alot, and showed me where I was going wrong with the script. So after a hard days work, I have finally gotten the tags submitted into the database, then increments when the same tag is entered more than once. The more times the tag has been entered the bigger the tag will look in the tag cloud. This has been a big break through after alot of hard work finally paying off and help from Andrew Johnson who I greatly appreciate for helping me so much.

Latest

I have learnt over the past few days how to style the results that are in the database with CSS instead of using a table. This means that I can make the results look much better with the use of Photoshop. I have also started to make progress with the tag cloud. I can pull the tags from the database if I enter them into the database myself, but cannot pull them from the tags that have been entered via the form. I have asked for help with the tutorial I am following which you can see here.