7/9 - 7/13 (Week 7)

This has been another week spent delving into partials and magic sort, but much more fruitfully than before.

I fixed the world partial, so now the overlay is the proper size, and the page-turn icon and links list both stay where they should (lower right and left, respectively) on both Firefox and Chrome. (Anyone using Internet Explorer is setting himself up for an unpleasant user experience to begin with, so I didn’t bother trying to figure out how to fix the partial in IE.) I also needed to be able to see tags on the world partial in order to check my helper methods for magic sort, so I added tags to the world and challenge partials. (Genevieve, feel free to change this in any way you see fit.)

Jordana and I met briefly to check in, and we both think I’m on track, so that’s good.

Michael, Reilly, and I decided to go adventuring into the wacky world of Git. With assistance, we were able to merge our branches. (This was after initially merging, realizing we’d broken things, fixing them, remerging, fixing more things, etc.) Now everyone community-side has each other’s latest changes and is up to date.

This week Reilly reconfigured the users info on the profile page (it’s lovely). Since the world, challenge, submission, etc. counts are no longer displayed on the info list, we decided that they could simply be displayed in the left pane, after the appropriate headings. I added the counts to the public/hidden options, but since those are only displayed on a user’s own profile, Jordana suggested that I add them to the sub navigation bar as well, which I did.

I finished the last of the helper methods for world, challenge, and user relationships, and am working on the world index first to incorporate these helpers’ return values into the existing sort method. In the chart below, a world, challenge, and user are represented as W, C, and U, respectively. Each relationship (created by, entered in, following, etc.) returns a constant which is multiplied by another factor in the main sort method.

In order to more easily check that all the helpers are acting appropriately, I’ve made some display changes to the world, challenge, and user partials. None of these will be staying in the designs, but they’ve made it much easier to check my progress with the sorting. After last week’s meeting, I was thinking about asking a department member who specializes in complicated sorting algorithms if (s)he wouldn’t mind sitting down with me and going over my plan of attack with magic sort. However, I think taking a few days off from it was extremely helpful, and I’ve also found some decent internet sources, so I think I’m going to keep going for now. I think I can have a pretty good version of magic sort on the worlds index page soon, and once that’s accomplished, porting it to the challenge index and users index should be easier.