Andy's Mid-Term

Since I am in the final stretch of my thesis, I took it upon myself to work on my site non-stop (i.e. 8+ hours a day) the past 4 weeks in an effort to finish as much as possible before I dedicate myself entirely to doing my thesis. As a result, my site is about 95% finished. So what I will do for my mid-term discussion is talk about all the ground work I had to put together (like graphics, blog creation, features, etc) before integrating the Nabaztag device. Then I can save the Nabaztag integration for my final presentation.

From a design perspective, I wanted to update my existing website with a wider interface (my old site was 800px wide, and the new site is 1024px wide to accomodate the larger displays that are more common these days). I also wanted the graphics to be a bit more slick, and needed to rearrange things on the site to allow for the new features to be unintrusive. So here's an example of my old site:

You may notice that the old site showed no valuable information on the main page without scrolling down. You could see the latest posts on the Free4All (a blog that the general public can post to) and the latest comments, but my posts are hidden well below that.

You'll also notice that there is a whole lot of wasted space at the top, and on the sides. From a design standpoint, that was the first thing I decided to clean up.

In the example of the new site, you can see that those changes helped a lot. There is much less wasted space, and the posts are immediately available without scrolling.

Since there is so much that went into the design and programming of this site, it would take far too long to post all the details of all the features I've implemented after the redesign. What I will do is list most of the major features I have added, and demo them in class so you get a visual understanding of what I created. The main features that have been built in to the site are: Privacy Groups and Posts, Private Comments, Advanced Account Management Tools, Custom User MoodIcons, MSN and Yahoo IM integration, Visual MoodIcon Selections, Animated Comment Emoticons, Basic HTML Comments, Advanced WYSIWYG Posting Interface, Advanced File Upload Management, Advanced Tags and Tagcloud, Shoutbox, Dynamic Menus and Options, and more.

The Nabaztag integration required I gain an understanding of the Nabaztag API. It is actually much simpler than I originally thought, as the API is simply called via standard http URL (with your specific parameters). The official API documentation I worked from can be found here: http://help.nabaztag.com/fiche.php?langue=3&fiche=29

More details will follow during the presentation and demonstration.

Andy