spack++

So, I dove in and learned some flex.  I watched many of these videos, referred to this gallery, installed flex builder 3 and cut some code for ShopThar.  I did a few things in not a ton of time, none of which anyone has likely noticed, but here’s a little list.

1. ShopThar pages, like this one, have a nice image pulled from amazon for ranking stars.  There was a bug where flex would translate the 100 based numbers into a 5.5 rating on a 5 scale.  Got a nice broken image.  So, I finally tracked down the problem (which was hard because what I thought was a built in flex function was actually a shopthar function) and fixed it.  No more broken images on reviews!
2. Used to have ARRAY or HASH stuff show up on product pages.  Again, it was hard to track down, but once I found a page with the problem, did some firebug magic, worked around memcache hanging onto bad data, and thought I fixed it.  Turns out the jury may be out a bit.  Just ran a couple queries.  
   • delete from sh_product where id in (select product_id from sh_product_distinctable where raw_value like ‘ARRAY%’);
   • Query OK, 1 row affected (7.17 sec)
   • delete from sh_product where id in (select product_id from sh_product_distinctable where raw_value like ‘HASH%’);
   • Query OK, 9665 rows affected (5 min 1.95 sec)
3. Sometimes I would get NAN (not a number) for slider stuff.  Turns out I was sending out garbage data.  I look specifically for that garbage data and filter it out.  Not the best fix, but at least I fixed that one instance.
4. Didn’t send out sets of distinctables (the checkboxes) when there was only one choice.  Not much of a choice if there’s only one, huh!

Flex!  I did all of that in flex.  Wow, better go update the resume, huh!  Did I ever mention that I paid someone to make my resume prettier?  Look how pretty!

Coming up next?

1. Change the checkboxes and filtering to act more like Yahoo! mail filtering.  I would like folks to be able to pick more than one thing from a set, and don’t quite have that worked out in my head.
2. Put the categories which are currently on the top of the page in html into flex.
3. See what I think about changing sliders to use the NumericStepper component.
4. Do some google analytics stuff for tighter tracking.

I am starting to get spider more and more, but real traffic hasn’t started to hit.

Oh, and I bought and put up diamondcomparer.com.  Took an hour or two to get all up and running.  A whole new vertical in an hour or two.  Someday this stuff will just have to start making money.  I want to get the engine working really smooth on diamondcomparer. 

Enjoy!

Earl

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 12:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.