Almost time to go and present the wonderful newsletter tool I wrote and posted about earlier.
It's been finished for more than a week, just took some time to setup the meeting and what not. Lets hope it all goes well and I don't have to re-code too much of it.
Sadly Vancouver trip is shelved :( Prices kept going up and up, and wasn't loving the choices for flight times. Perhaps we'll find something else to do, or I can spend some quality time watching more Stargate SG-1 (still not caught up to current season.. not by FAR!)
BFN
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Vacation: Vancouver?
Considering Vancouver as next week's destination instead.. I've been there before, beautiful city! Not sure how much we can amuse ourselves for 3 days?
BFN
BFN
Deluxe Field trip
Yesterday afternoon we went on a team field trip to Deluxe facilities in Burbank. It was educational.
Deluxe does the encoding for our trailers, and VOD stuff for iTunes, Amazon, Walmart etc. During our tour we visited the 'vault' where they keep all the media. I found on a shelf near the door the Stargate Atlantis episode "McKay And Mrs. Miller" on tape.. sadly I was being watched at the time (probably cos I oooooh'd too loudly) otherwise I would have snagged it (maybe not.. but I would have liked to!).
Considering going to London next week with my friend Deb, it's only $1500/person flight + hotel.
BFN
Deluxe does the encoding for our trailers, and VOD stuff for iTunes, Amazon, Walmart etc. During our tour we visited the 'vault' where they keep all the media. I found on a shelf near the door the Stargate Atlantis episode "McKay And Mrs. Miller" on tape.. sadly I was being watched at the time (probably cos I oooooh'd too loudly) otherwise I would have snagged it (maybe not.. but I would have liked to!).
Considering going to London next week with my friend Deb, it's only $1500/person flight + hotel.
BFN
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Best Practices for content to go live
Over the time i've worked at MGM, we've been having some problems with how things go live after they are entered to the content management system.
The idea of "stage" and "production" seems to be confusing to the users. Since I made it on mgm.com a two stage click ("Click here to submit to stage", then "Click here to submit to production") the users simply click through both pages, and consider it an inconvenience (can you please remove the two pages and do both at once?).
To this end I think I will implement a "two user" policy for content to go live. The person who enters the content can submit the content for review, and the other person tests the content, then has the ability to send live. Of course I'll put in an extra user (me) who can do both ;)
Why don't users test the content? This is the question that has bugged me the most. Every single week I find someone live that wasn't tested (I can usually tell because the page is broken :S ). Constantly we reiterate how important it is to just go "look" at the page once you send the content live and see if it's even there!!
Users...
BFN
The idea of "stage" and "production" seems to be confusing to the users. Since I made it on mgm.com a two stage click ("Click here to submit to stage", then "Click here to submit to production") the users simply click through both pages, and consider it an inconvenience (can you please remove the two pages and do both at once?).
To this end I think I will implement a "two user" policy for content to go live. The person who enters the content can submit the content for review, and the other person tests the content, then has the ability to send live. Of course I'll put in an extra user (me) who can do both ;)
Why don't users test the content? This is the question that has bugged me the most. Every single week I find someone live that wasn't tested (I can usually tell because the page is broken :S ). Constantly we reiterate how important it is to just go "look" at the page once you send the content live and see if it's even there!!
Users...
BFN
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Bad code day
Ever have those days when you just didn't enjoy your code? You get a project with no spec, a very basic design which doesn't describe what half the stuff is supposed to do, an html version of that with no working links, so no clue where they all supposed to go, and a really really short deadline (do it today!).
UGH
BFN
UGH
BFN
Changing file extensions
When we moved the main site from JSP to PHP, we wanted to make sure that if people had old links, they would still work.
To this end, most of the pages ended up with the same filenames, the only change was the extension. Initially there was a mod_rewrite rule created that would push all people going to *.do to *.php. For some reason it stopped working. No clue why?
My experience with mod rewrite is extremely limited. I'm happy to say I'm somewhat baffled by regular expressions. It takes me an inordinate amount of time to write them.
As an interim solution, I updated the conf so that *.do would be executed as *.php. Almost all of the requests for .do pages were for one particular page, so now we have two copies of the same page. Not an ideal solution by far, but at least they aren't getting 404's anymore.
In my efforts to try and fix this problem, we decided to make some changes to our 404. Previously it simply redirected to the homepage, as we didn't have time to work out what we really wanted it to do. I updated so the 404 is a php page, and I check the URI and redirect the user to the search page, with what they request as a search query. It's quite slick, and handles proper movie names.
For a sneak peek (not live yet) try one of our movie or tv show names after the following url: http://vendor.mgm.com/movie name Unfortunately it doesn't handle the "lack" of spaces yet. That's going to be handled once my new DB design is implemented.
http://vendor.mgm.com/rescue dawn or http://vendor.mgm.com/stargate atlantis
BFN
To this end, most of the pages ended up with the same filenames, the only change was the extension. Initially there was a mod_rewrite rule created that would push all people going to *.do to *.php. For some reason it stopped working. No clue why?
My experience with mod rewrite is extremely limited. I'm happy to say I'm somewhat baffled by regular expressions. It takes me an inordinate amount of time to write them.
As an interim solution, I updated the conf so that *.do would be executed as *.php. Almost all of the requests for .do pages were for one particular page, so now we have two copies of the same page. Not an ideal solution by far, but at least they aren't getting 404's anymore.
In my efforts to try and fix this problem, we decided to make some changes to our 404. Previously it simply redirected to the homepage, as we didn't have time to work out what we really wanted it to do. I updated so the 404 is a php page, and I check the URI and redirect the user to the search page, with what they request as a search query. It's quite slick, and handles proper movie names.
For a sneak peek (not live yet) try one of our movie or tv show names after the following url: http://vendor.mgm.com/movie name Unfortunately it doesn't handle the "lack" of spaces yet. That's going to be handled once my new DB design is implemented.
http://vendor.mgm.com/rescue dawn or http://vendor.mgm.com/stargate atlantis
BFN
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