dummied

Open-ing wider

At a glance

This entry was written on June 15, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled The Open's opening.

The entry following this is entitled Settling into a groove.

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This entry has been tagged as CSS, MovableType, Newspapers, Recommended, Sports, Work, XHTML, rss.

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After a near-constant blur of work over the past few months, the U.S. Open is here and our not-100-percent-ready-for-primetime website is starting to lift off the ground.

I've done so much more for this site — backend, frontend, editorial — than anything else I have done in my life that getting everything down on paper (or even in this digital form) seems like a daunting feat.

Of course, that might just be because I've been at work since 6:30 this morning so I could design and code up our hole location update page after the USGA release the pin placements. The rest of today has been spent putting out (or at least tamping down) fires big and small — getting problem photos fixed in our dynamic galleries, coordinating with the mothership to get our largely-untested leaderboard and player scorecard app debugged, coordinating photos and headlines and just doing general fixes and cleanup.

The photo galleries are, by far, the most complicated bit of programming I've ever done in my life. For hardcore PHP coders out there, it's probably a piece of cake, but for a largely-design-centric guy like me, it's a beast of if-else combos, sql queries, the image processing guts of zenphoto and the always-cool javascript overlay of LightboxJSv2. I keep waiting for the whole thing to fall down around my ears, but everything has gone smoothly on my end of things so far (the initial backend system, which reads image metadata to populate the database and does the initial resize on the photographers' raw images is still a little fussy from time to time).

I've got three blogs working, two obvious ones (The Fairway, about the actual golf, and The Gallery, about the fans and general atmosphere) and one not-so-obvious one to handle the live updates. All three are built with Wordpress instead of my usually-preferred Movable Type for a few reasons.

First of all, I didn't have time to wait for a Movable Type license negotiation (especially when my initial request for a quote on a large-scale install was completely ignored) or approval for the funds to purchase one.

In the course of using Wordpress for these, I also discovered a lot of advantages to it — or more specifically, I found that the ways I have used Movable Type in the past, to create chunks of HTML to include elsewhere, can be done with WP as well. I think all my dynamic gallery coding took away a lot of the mystery shrouding php and the Wordpress template code.

Once I got past the whole "This is voodoo" thing, WP became much, much easier to work with than I could have ever imagined.

In other "Gee, who knew I could do that," site developments, I'm parsing RSS feeds (and the podcast feed, specifically using Simplepie), still writing and maintaining copious amounts of CSS and making the development environment as rapid as I can since new comments, ideas and suggestions always seem to come at the worst possible times (like on the day before the Open when I plan to catch up on sleep).

The breaking news blog/section, for instance, was a last-minute addition that I got set up from zero to 60 in the course of yesterday afternoon and evening. It's a heavily-hacked Wordpress install sorted by last-modified and with a special include file that pumps a chunk of html to the overall site front page.

In all, I'm doing everything I can today to keep this puppy off the ground and hoping a lot of the technical issues get smoother as we head into the weekend.