What’s coming
June 3rd, 2008
Well, I haven’t updated this site in quite some time, but not because I’m not motivated to do so! My nanny was out of town last month, meaning that not only did nothing get done here but also nothing got done on that other project, the one that I absolutely must finish before I can turn my attention back to programming. But she is back! And slowly, slowly I am making progress again.
I want to share some of my plans for the coming site overhaul, more for me than because anyone else will actually read this. A big piece will be redoing the database backend to make it easier to associate cardsets that are the same but slightly different. For instance, let’s take the cardset with farm animals. There are different languages for this cardset — English and German. Let’s say I also want to add some new things, like a set that does animal sounds and a set that tells what the baby animals are called. Still, they are the same basic set.
Under the new schema, each cardset will have 3 identifiers. First will be the cardset ID. All the cardsets that cover basically the same content will have the same ID. Next will be the language. This will be tied to a little list of flag images, and the flag image will appear as an overlay in the lower left corner for non-English cardsets. Third will be the level. The level is not really a difficulty level (names of presidents are still way harder than animal sounds), but just a way for differentiating aspects of the cardsets. The level number will appear in the lower right corner.
The other thing I want to accomplish with the next overhaul is a robust user application for adding and editing cardsets. Right now, the image and sound must be uploaded directly into the card. In the future, the images and sounds will be uploaded first, into an image and sound repository on the server. Then the images and sounds can be dragged onto cards to create the actual content. I also want to add a nicer text editor, maybe something like the free one used in vbulletin, and have the cards display more user formatting choices.
The plan is that the kids will go to Houston next week and stay 2 weeks with Grammy, and if this happens I think I can make some big progress on my planned overhaul. However, Grammy fell recently and hurt her tailbone. She has a doctor’s appointment today and maybe after that we will know if the visit can still happen as planned. If not, this overhaul will still happen, but it will obviously take a bit longer.
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