The repository for the rebuild is public so anyone can view the progress and maybe even contribute? https://github.com/Mjames951/PlanetApplication
Right now the website is in good standing. it's functional and does everything I want it to do in order for us to advertise it across the city. There are a LOT of changes and functionality I want to bring to the site, but I want to focus all my effort on completing my final semester of college. Expect small to zero updates to the website between now and early December as I do that. I will still scour the internet for local shows and post them here, but after I graduate I plan on rebuilding the website with new knowledge and set it up for greater success later down the line. The scope of the project has changed and I'm still debating whether this will be a Bandcamp 2 or if it will be more of a site documentation site. Who knows! I could use some feedback on that. -Matthew
Currently, I'm working on adding an 'upload show' feature where anyone can upload a show flier / details and then have it approved to be on the website (yes I figured out how to do it now). A prerequisite for this is a small email system that would notify whenever someone would do that. I figured out how to do this (it was quick and easy), so now whenever anyone fills out a feedback or contact form: it emails me their input. I also figured out some cool django filtering for dates to add the day of the week to shows (which is a whole lot more convenient), removed the 'no show today' animation for mobile (it was taking up space), and did some slight adjustments here and there.
I feel like I exhaust every test case when preparing for a deployment, but every time I deploy I find a bunch of small problems that I overlooked. With this deployment I fixed/added: 'nothin today' image no longer has a border when hovering (as it's unclickable), mobile h1 tags have extra top/bottom margin, outlinks (other scene sites and small local labels sections) now actually have their respective websites linked and gain a border when hovering. Google developer mobile tool is cool and all, but it doesn't 100% reflect how the site is going to look on iphone. I hope to find a tool for this without having to deploy my own test server.
Yes I completed the makeover. I believe the site looks a lot more professional now. No longer will there be strange gaps between sections and the bottom of the page with slightly unreadable white text at the bottom. Now there is a sea at the bottom and it's cool yes. I think the site is and looks very nice now. it has all the base functionality I'd want out of it, so I say this calls for a version 1.0 . My favorite addition is an outline when hovering over clickable pictures (except the no event today picture, I gotta fix that) and the underline disappearing when hovering over clickable text. It brings a lot of life to the site. I've also added a section to show off other local sites and record labels! Also, I've began versioning my CSS files because the site wasn't updating to the newest CSS files due to the cache. Now that they are versioned, the browser thinks they are a different file entirely and will load in the new one. Now that that's done with, I'll be working on event page improvements, an email system to notify me of things, and other small changes. After all that is done, then I hope to add articles and a forum by the end of the year.
I've spent this past week giving the website a makeover! It's coming along really nicely and I've been eliminating a SHIT TON of excess code within my html and css files. Especially due to my recent discovery of the rem unit of measure. rem is based in factors of the root font size, so if the root font size is '20px' and I say something is 2rem wide, this it ends up being 40px wide. This is great when dealing with window resizing. Before, I had everything's size set to px until the window size became too slim, then I went and specified a new relational size for every single element that I specified (in view width). BUT NOW I can just change the base font size to be relational to the view width and EVERYTHING changes size with it. I have also began using django's template extension which allows me to not have to copy and paste the code for the top banner and bottom section for every html file. Every file will now just extend the base (master) file. I'll be finishing this update within the week.
Now when bands upload their shows there's a checkbox option for "ask a punk for the address". If this is checked then "(DM)" is automatically added after the venue name. This "(DM)" is clickable and brings the user to a page that explains what this means. I also changed upcoming events to 4 events, added a band login button at the bottom of important pages, and then changed how the events are shown in the admin view for better readability.
Sometimes a simple addition to the website seems like just that, a 'simple addition'. However, oftentimes a simple addition can beg massive changes. We wanted to change the 'upcoming events' section on the homepage to show up to 5 shows at a time. I had all 3 events hardcoded individually, so to make things easier I changed it so the backend only sent the 5 most current events and the frontend would cycle through them in a for loop. Now that the upcoming events section was a lot taller, it made the rest of the homepage look kinda whack. This looks fine on mobile, but desktop has the sections setup in a 2 wide grid. I didn't do research on CSS grid and instead opted in making all the sections float left. Which means the starts of each new row is the same position for both columns. If I wanted the columns to be individual, I think I'd have to figure out a whole new system. Anyway, the next update to the site keeps growing as I make it. As long as the current system is working fine then I'm not going to rush things. Expect small updates throughout the month as I tackle things individually.
After uploading the last update, I had a eureka moment. Instead of learning how to javascript an enlarged view of a poster when clicking on it, I could just create an entirely new webpage, feed it the id of the poster a user clicked on, and then have the page just be the image with it's width at 90%. I also put a character limit on show titles and venues and added a time field for devlogs so that 2 devlogs on the same day (like today) are correctly in order.
This update added: "today" section on homepage, removed "upcoming event", revamped about page, and added the event page! A problem I ran into pretty quick with the 'upcoming event' section was that if there were 2 shows on the same day, then only 1 of them would be enlarged. So I created the "today" section that would populate itself more than once if there was more than 1 show on any given day. Due to the way I implemented that, I had to get rid of the 'upcoming event' section. The about page has been completely revamped to tell you guys more information and to make us seem more legit. We will be printing it out and handing the about page to people as an informational flier. Also, the event page 0.1 has been added. It just lists every show so you can see all of them that aren't on the front page. A search bar and other stuff will be added to that in the future.
I don't know how long the website was down. It was definitely more than 2 days, but that generic 500 error seems to have originated with the SqLite database. I never fully figured it out, because when looking into the issue I found out that fly.io (the service I'm using to host the website) doesn't have replication between volumes (their storage system). This means that every machine that ran my website would have its own unique database. If someone added an event, it would be possible that some people may not see it because the machine they connected to wasn't the one that the event was uploaded to. It ain't scalable and I don't know how to script a replicator, so I swapped the database to a PostGreSQL on AWS (simplicity). Anyway, this is now the first devlog (until this database gets wiped too). Before this there was a post on how annoying CSS is and one saying yippee!! the site is up!