Getting people to visit one of my sites has always been a struggle. I’m ready for some serious feedback on FantasyLife, but I’m not sure how to draw the users to the site. I try to avoid blatent spamming of message boards, since that usually serves to piss people off more then make them interested.

I’ve had some success in the past posting my sites on the DreamHost Site Of The Month contest. I did this for FantasyLife the other night, but only one person has commented. I made the mistake of posting the site on 10/4 at 12:30 AM EST. But DreamHost out west so the timestamp on the post ended up being 9:30PM on 10/3. Why does this make a difference your wondering. Well the ordering of sites on the list appears to be “day” DESC, “time” ASC. This meant that FantasyLife, even though it was the most recent post was already below several other sites. So to anyone who posts there site try to post it early in the AM west coast time and you’ll be near the top for that day.

Anyway, the one comment was about the design being bland, which I can agree with. Trying to “spice up” the site is something I’ve thought about a lot, but I haven’t really made much headway with. I’m stumped trying to come up with imagery that fits the site, without looking hokey/cliched and doesn’t take away from the functionality.

Popularity: 4% [?]

When I originally started this blog I meant to include more code examples…

An important part of FantasyLifeGame.com is user created posts where they claim points for doing real life accomplishments. The list of accomplishments is determined by the league commishioner and the user simply selects one from the list when making their post. Originally this was done via a strandard form select. But I realized quickly that this wouldn’t work. The list could be 50 or more items and wouldn’t work well in a select.

I then tried setting the size of the select to 5, which worked better. It was easier to navigate the list and select which one you wanted. However I wanted to add a mouseover effect that would pop up a tooltip displaying more information about the option. This worked great in Firefox, but IE does not allow the onmouseover action on options.

To work around this I made a “fake” select box. In essence it looks and acts the same as a standard select, but allowed for more customization and flexibility.

First the select:

   Option 1
   Option 2
   Option 3

Just a standard div tag with some links. The hidden form field will be used later to store the actual value. Now lets style it so it looks more like a select box.

I gave each item a bottom border because longer items may wrap onto multiple lines. By giving the div a fixed height and width and setting the overflow to auto a vertical scroll bar will appear when the list gets long.

Now we just need a little javascript to set the form value.

function set_fake_select(id) {
   //turn off any active options
   var elems = document.getElementsByName("fake_select1");
   for(var i=0; i < elems.length; i++) {
      elems[i].className = "";
   }

   //mark the fake option as active
   document.getElementById("fake_select_opt" + id).className = "active";

   //store the value in the hidden form field for submission
   document.getElementById("select1").value = id;
}

That’s it. Doing this allows me to use the onmouseover event for each option. Plus I have more flexibilty is styling the select. I can do something simple like tweek the active color or something more advanced like using script.aculo.us for some cool select effect. It also wouldn’t be hard to modify this as a multiselect which wouldn’t force the user to hold down the ctrl key when making each choice - a huge pet peeve of mine.

Popularity: 11% [?]

A few weeks ago I decided to drop the multiplayer Ajax Rock, Scissor, Paper site I was working on.   My biggest problem was that when I work on these pet projects I don’t have hours to just sit and code.  By nature a site like Shoot4It.com it was impossible to just sit down and work on it for 20 minutes then walk away.  There was no real way to break it down into bite size chunks that I could whenever I had a few minutes.

So in the end I put that on hold and started on FantasyLifeGame.com.  I’ve owned the domain for over a year now and have been kicking around the idea long before that.  I’ve made two previous attempts to code the site, but scrapped them both times because I didn’t like the way they were playing out.

I can’t say enough good thinks about cakephp.  It’s made my coding life so much easier and enjoyable.  Now I dread even thinking about a site that isn’t using cake (of some other structered MVC framework).

It would probably be best to read the description of what FantasyLifeGame.com is before continuing reading this post.

I’ve been lax in writing about my adventures in creaking FantasyLife, athough I didn’t really do anything too revolutionary here.  I hit some of the usual Ajax snags.  I spent a solid day getting the inline editing to work only to realize I didn’t like the user experience.  In the end I went with a modified type of inline editing where I swapped out the entire div with a form.  A much more pleasant (and pretty sleek) experience.  I sprinkled Ajax in places I thought it would work best, but didn’t go overboard.

I finally got to use Lightbox in a project, which I was dying to do, since I think it’s the coolest thing ever.  Although I only allow 4 pictures per post.  I’m not trying to be the next Flickr here.

Anyway, 99% of the main functionality is done.  There are hundreds of smaller things I want to add and lots of tidying up to do, but the site is quite usable right now.

Popularity: 6% [?]