Well it has been a while. I’ve actually been quite busy the past few months.

Outside of work a fair chunk of my time has been devoted to a rewrite of the core code of the Sydney Lindy Exchange website. I’ve been it’s Web Admin for 5 years now. What started as a few HTML pages the first year with a simple form mailer for registration has now progressed to an (almost) full CMS.

The rewrite allowed me to break the code in to easier to manage chunks/modules of code. I didn’t achieve everything I wanted to this year as I just ran out of time.  Early on whilst re-coding the site, I wanted it to be developed around a ‘Form builder and manager’ interface, as the main purpose of the site is registration for the event which is a form.

I did make quite a bit of headway with the form builder, however it was starting to get clunky and the deadline approached faster than I realised, so I ended up rehashing the rest of the code.

I did also remove all tables out of the layout this year thanks to css, however realised after the event when I was showing the site off to a collegue that the site didn’t display correct in IE6 thanks to it’s wierd and wonderful way of processing CSS :-S.

The other big challenge I had with this site was a mailing list.  In the past I had a script which bulk sent all the email messages at once.  This worked the first year, however second year not all recipients got the messages.  I found out after the event had ended the reason for this was that a limitation of the host was 200 email messages (or more recipients) per hour.  So this year I wrote a script which a cron job runs every 5 minutes to send a number of emails.  I need to do more work on this so all email from the site (registrations etc) need to be run through the mail queue, plus better management of that to ensure that 200 emails per hour is not met.

I still have all the code for the Form Builder, so in the new year I hope to look at that again.

(And yes this post did take a month to write :-S)