Furmeets UK Revamp - Now Live!

[slycat]

For a long time I've wanted to redo the Furmeets.co.uk website as it was made in a very hodge podge fashion and with the experience I've gained since with web design and coding, I knew I could do better. So finally, I've got round to remaking the site. So far, I've only done the front page as I wanted to get it done before Confuzzled and time was against me. So now the site looks like this:


New features are:

New front page re-written from scratch including full CSS layout
New version of Google Maps API including custom paw flags!
Multi-day event support (event will not disappear until the end date has elapsed)
Event titles as an addition to the location for describing what the event is

I've still got to re-do the other pages including the submission page so right now, you can't specify what the site title is nor when an event ends but once I'm back from Confuzzled, I will get to doing that as well as updating all the other pages. Other things I still need to do are to improve mobile device support so the full site can be viewed if preferred (Google Maps API v3 works quite nicely on most smartphones) and also I'm not happy with the look of the meet list yet so probably some more tweaks to be had. I do want to get user logins and site management done but that's a long way off as it's no simple task.

Anyway, I appreciate feedback so if you've any comments or constructive criticism on what could be done better or added, I'd be happy to hear about it!

Comments

[explodingbat.livejournal.com]

(LJ declared me a spammer, so i'll try posting again sans links; sorry if you get this message twice!)

When i tried to add an event, the site said:

406 Not Acceptable

An appropriate representation of the requested resource /addmeets.php could not be found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

None-the-less though, thanks for trying to keep the site updated!

[slycat.livejournal.com]

I can only suspect it was due to an invalid character in one of the fields. I highly suspect the / in the location to be honest. I can't look into making a fix for now unfortunately as I'm preparing for Confuzzled. Could you try resubmitting without the slash?

[explodingbat.livejournal.com]

No, it wasn't the location / , but something like that -- possibly the £ sign?

I kept trying and eventually got it to work, but unfortunately i missed the URL, so now there're two event listings, one with it, one without. No hurry, but closer to the day deleting the first one would probably be good. Sorry about that.

Anyway, thanks for the hint, and again for making the site in the first place.

Hope you have fun at CF!

[slycat.livejournal.com]

No worries. Have removed the duplicate. Thanks for letting me know.

That submission page needs a lot of work due to the way I hacked it together originally. Needs more validation to prevent weirdness and better translation of special characters

[enteirah]

Great to see multiday support is here. Now I can stop pestering about it :p

In terms of user management and logins, I think the only real thing that's needed is an easy way to edit events later, incase someone cancels/moves a meet. Rather than a massive rework with a login system, you could just link an auto generated key to the entry. Then when someone adds a new entry, just email them a link containing an edit link with the unique key embedded in the url. Quick and dirty as it means they have to keep hold of the email, but does the job in a lot of cases.

[slycat.livejournal.com]

That's not a bad idea. I may well do just that. Thanks!