November 15, 2008

Not so long ago, there were two Happenstands. Of course there was the Happenstand that you are looking at now with all of its pretty colors and amazingly simple to read event listings and useful directory of artists and local galleries, but there was another Happenstand. One not so pretty. One hidden away from the light of day. Fortunately no one else saw this private site except for me as it was used to update items on the public site and perform other administrative housekeeping. I spent a lot of time jumping back and forth between the two and, frankly, it was really annoying. Most of my development time lately has been spent addressing this and I am happy to share with you the news that there now exists only one Happenstand. Instead of two sites, there is one site with a hidden "layer" that allows administration from the front end. This really only affects me for now, but it ultimately means less time updating events and more time for making the site better. Down the road, parts of this hidden layer could be exposed for site users (i.e. you) to take a more active role in contributing and updating the site without me - that would be pretty cool.

In other news, I've rolled out a couple of other updates around the site over the past couple weeks. The event suggestion form received a little more love since it is the primary means of getting info into the system. It was difficult to handle the event info and image uploading all in one place and have it not be confusing on the front end when things broke or the form contained invalid data or the images didn't meet the requirements, etc. So now the suggestion process has been broken up into two steps. This makes for a simpler form up front and an optional second form afterward. The improved image upload form lets you upload multiple images all in one screen and see how they will look on the site. Sweet!

Another thing that has bugged me for a while is that to see the location information for an event, you would have to leave the event page and go to the venue page just to see the address or phone number. Lame! Now at the bottom of each event page, if the event has been associated with a venue from the site, you will see the location information and a small map. These new maps are also displayed on the venue detail pages (example). Please note, these maps only show the location for the one item - if you want to see all venues in an area on a map and what is happening at each of them now, use the full Happenstand events map.

I also updated the way the upcoming events and past events lists look at the bottom of artist pages and place pages. The old way to toggle views with a small text link seemed a little un-obvious to me and I've been into big tabs lately, so presto-chango, it is done (example).

I've also been playing with code compressing, caching and some other tricks to get pages loading faster. Things have have felt a little sluggish lately but I am happier now after some additional tweaks this week.

So now I can start working on new features that everyone can enjoy. I've got a few ideas and with the holidays coming up, some time to play. More to come soon...

Posted by Lucas at 12:30pm