Where in the World are the Evans Kids...?
I decided to write this web application because my grandma and mom
have complained that us Evans kids travel around the world too often,
and it is hard to keep track of where we are at. As a learning
exercise, I wanted to pick up PHP and try to learn the Smarty templating system, which I was aware of because my blog runs on bblog, which uses it.
The plan is to use the Google Maps API to locate people on a
map. People are stored in a MySQL database accessed via the ADOdb abstraction layer from
php scripts. Access control is handled by the phpGACL access control
system, and I've written up some simple stuff to do login
authentication and use php's session control to keep information
around (so you need to have cookies enabled.)
Problems with Internet Explorer Browsers
I just checked the site out on Internet Explorer. At first, it
completely did not work and gave an error: "Error loading internet
site http://FuguTabetai.com/where. Aborted" or something like that.
Searching around, this problem pops up because of the Javascript used
to display the map. I moved the javascript into a function, and
called it on the body onload, and the site would load.
The map would not show up though. The problem turned out to be
that for some reason, IE was not honoring the style="width:100%;
height:80%" CSS properties on the div. It would just make it
invisible. I manually set the height to 700px, and now it shows up,
but I lose the ability to grow the map on larger monitors on all other
browsers. That is so terrible.
Also, the timelines for each person do not show up at all in
Internet Explorer. I have no idea why. It probably has to do with
the complicated DIVs and sizing that I use around the tables, but
really this is something that IE should handle. I am so amazingly
shocked at how poorly IE handles STANDARD CSS.
Status
The Where in the World are the Evans Kids (which I'm calling WAEK for
short) system is currrently at version 1.0 beta. I'll list the
things I have to do below:
- Start map out in a place that keeps everyone on screen at once. See
this page.
- Add some "I forgot my password" sort of system.
- Integrate in some access checking. Right now all people are
available for all maps. Allow people to create private maps and
public maps. Allow people to choose whether they are visible for
other people's maps or not.
Where Are the Evans Kids... At
FuguTabetai.com. A work in
progress.
Current WAEK Version: 1.0 beta.