The WAD Blog

I have a couple of questions that I would like to get answers to.  I am going to describe a scenario of a web based application that I am interested in and the questions will be at the end:

At my place of work we have bug fixes and upgrades that go in every month as part of releases.  I have been keeping track of them with the provided ticket tracking software.  As the release manager, I have been tasked with creating a “ticket creating guide” for the users.  This guide includes a part about “How to set the correct priority.” I have a list of criteria that I typed up in a word doc and linked to my intranet release management site.  This document has not been received well and the feedback has been along the lines of “the document is somewhat confusing.”  So I am going to first make the priority setting doc more user friendly with additional structure and some rewording, but I want to take it to the next level. 

I want to put together a web based form that will ask a series of questions about the given ticket.  Each question has a set of answers with radio buttons beside them.  The user selects the appropriate answer and clicks the “next” button.   The next question the user reads, will depend upon the answer to the preceding question.  When the user reaches the end of the question string, a proper ticket priority populates the last screen.  What are these applications called?  Can someone point me in the right direction to finding a way to create one of these?

Tags: Uncategorized by 08SJordanSchenck
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In my recent attempts to write HTML from scratch (and put together some assemblance of a web page), I have found myself learning things very much the hard way… The web page we are all independently developing for this MIS Course has been fun, and challenging.  I have been thinking about a recent trial I made it through, and I figured I would share. 

The page requires three frames… a header, a navigation frame, and a show frame.  Nothing new here right? Well at one point I found myself sitting for five hours straight trying to get this page to do what I wanted and just absolutely could not get it to cooperate.  I was trying to make it so the navigation frame links were controling what was showing in the next frame over…  the show frame.  Easy enough? Well I was getting so frustrated because I thought I was doing exactly what I read in the w3schools site and I had gone over the structure of the site about 20 times… still the links kept opening new pages in a new window.  Which would have been fine if all I was doing was opening links to other external websites.  But I needed a page about me and a cob comparison page to open in the targeted show frame.  Long story short, I ended up “rigging it” such that every page I created contained a copy of the index page with the navigation and header pages but the show frame was different. Needless to say this was extremely redundant and inefficient. 

I was ready to throw in the towel when I asked a buddy of mine to take a look at it let me know what he thought. He took a look at the code and about 15 minutes later he came back to me with … “What’s a showfame?”  I promptly responded with, “No, its showFRAME!”  I then looked at my html again…. and sure enough I had written the first link (the one that I copied all the others with) to say “target = “showfame”"!  I quickly changed them all to the correct showframe target and like magic, it worked!  I felt silly, but the lesson I learned about writing html, is that I need to pay closer attention to detail and it doesn’t hurt to get a fresh pair of eyes to look at it every once in a while.  My buddy told me that his experience with writing code,  has been when it starts blowing up and going wrong, it is usually something very small like that.  Again, just sharing this in hopes that others can also learn from my frustrating experience.  Good luck!

Tags: HTML by 08SJordanSchenck
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Most of my web experience has to do with developing and maintaining a website for Brook Valley Country Club in Greenville, NC.  It was a pretty sweet deal, I would build the website and they would let me play golf whenever I wanted.  I enjoyed an entire year of unlimited golf for me, and my buddies!  The challenges I faced included making sure I successfully implemented all of the features desired by the business on a very limited budget.  I took and edited all of the pictures for the site.  I built, published, and maintained the site with Microsoft FrontPage, which is fairly simple, but was a good fit for our purposes.  I don’t think Brook Valley is posting my work anymore, I have not been the administrator for a year now.  I told them I was passing the reigns off when I moved away.

I also have tons of experience with electronic commerce on eBay.  For two years, I owned and operated an eBay store called Pirate’s Paradise.  I basically bought and sold vintage toys (mostly GI Joe).  My initial inventory was the collection I acquired as a child.  I sold just about everything I had from childhood and realized that there might be a little money to be made in this area.  So I began hunting the better deals on ebay… buying in large lots and breaking the collections up for individual sale.  I have to say it was fun and I made a little extra money.  The best part is I was able to improve and exand my personal collection of action figures and accessories (yeah I am just a big kid).¼/p>

Tags: Experience by 08SJordanSchenck
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