Archive for the ‘Coding’ Category

The Messy Launch of geo.pick

written by Drew | 2009.316 Fri 13 Nov

My current web project is called geo.pick, which is basically a web site that picks a city and country at random from anywhere in the world. A far as I knew when I started the project, nothing like it existed anywhere on the Internet.

geo-pick.com screen capture 2009-11-13-11-25-12I had actually launched geo.pick back in March, where it was called “Geo-Pick”. I remember it took an incredibly long time to decide on a name for the site, and when it came to purchasing a domain name only the hyphenated version of “geopick” was available.

This new version, which was launched this morning, has a nicer interface than the previous version, but unfortunately it has the same level of functionality. I had hoped to launch a fuller-featured site by this morning, but it was a lot harder than I’d expected – the site runs on an alpha version of my Foley Engine, which is still in a disorganised mess.

I decided to upload everything I had at the time this morning, having set myself an artificial deadline of today, because I couldn’t stand to see the site in its former state. Even so, I found myself being incredibly stressed that things weren’t moving as quickly (or as reliably) as I’d liked. I think I’ll have to spend a lot of time working on how to streamline things, and make them more efficient in future.

Anyhow, please visit the new geo.pick site if you have a spare moment, and provide some feedback and your suggestions for the site’s future.

HTML 5 in Internet Explorer

written by Drew | 2009.284 Mon 12 Oct

The new DREWspective design actually uses HTML 5, which is something I’ve gotten very excited about as it should make building web pages much easier. Funnily enough, I never thought of testing the design in Internet Explorer, until now.

It turns out that IE7 (at least) doesn’t recognise HTML 5 tags, like section and article, so even with regular CSS styles IE will not apply any styling to them whatsoever. If you had seen the site in Internet Explorer, you would have seen a mess.

Fortunately there is a JavaScript hack that solves the problem, which I’ve just applied to the site.