Competitive Analysis and Tagging

It's been a while since I last blogged, so I thought I best update it before it went on even longer. Although I haven't blogged, I have still been working on my project during this time, carrying out a competitive analysis of 3 websites that have some relation to the website I am creating, and trying to add the tagging feature to the website.

The competitive analysis comprised of me looking at 3 different websites and evaluating them on different criteria. The three websites I looked at are:

• http://www.analysedreams.co.uk/
• http://dreamcrowd.com/
• http://twitter.com/

The criteria that I looked at whilst carrying out the analysis are:

• Homepage
• Navigation
• Site Organization
• Links and Labels
• Search and Search Results
• Readability
• Performance
• Content

During this period I have been trying to get the tagging function to work on the website. This has proved to be a challange. I have now created a field in the form that allows users to submit tags when they are submitting a dream to the website to the site. The tags are stored in the database.

I have created two other tables in the database. These are dreams_tagged and dreams_tags. The dreams_tagged table contains 3 fields; tagged_id, tag_id and dream_id. The The dreams_tags table also contains 3 fields; tag_id, tag_name and num_dreams. The idea of these two tables is to give each tag it's own unique ID and then count how many times the same tag has been submitted into the database. It will then increase the num_dreams amount by every time the tag with the same tag_name has been counted.

This is where I have struggled. I understand the concept of what I need to do, but I now need to try and implement it. I need to run a query to count the number of tags that have been entered. Also to make the tag cloud, I need a CSS file that changes the size of the font depending on the number in the num_dreams field. So the higer the number in this field the bigger the font will be in the tag cloud.

I feel I will be able to get this function to work, but it may take some time, and alot of trial and error. However, this is the only way I am going to learn, so it is very beneficial to me.

Form Validation

After having the problem of the form submitting blank data into the databse when the submit button was pressed, I needed a way o overcome this. I decided to use form validation with JQuery. So now when the submit button for the form is clicked, a message will be shown telling the user that they have to fill out the fields before they can submit the form. Even if one of the fields in the form are not filled in then the data will not be submitted. Both the name and dream fields have to be filled in for the data to be sent to the database.