Grails Challenge: 15 hour update

An article by Glen    2 Comments

Just back from a week at the beach on hols and feeling fantastic. I must say that progress has been a lot slower in the second set of 7 hours but I’m still pretty on track for my 20 hour deadline. SlimTimer is reporting 14.8 hours on the clock, so I figure it must be time for an update.

RSS and Atom generation of “Recent Entries” is in and happening. Here’s a grab from Newzcrawler showing what an Aggregator should see:

Full Text Search of entries using my Groogle code is now in place. Indexer will get tripped as new entry is added to the db, and have put some code in to do a nightly optimize to keep is tight.

The Ajax preview feature of “Add a Blog” is slowly getting there (but still having some grief with Scriptaculous getting my visual effects happening. I’m a bit of a Javascript bunny, so everything takes a lot longer here than it should. It’s kinda gratifying to be able to add your URL and see GroovyBlogs nicely rendered a parse of your URL, but I’m not sure it’s really that useful. Good sample code, though.)

Implementation of “Hot Entries” is now in (which I am planning on making that “last 7 days” rather than “last 24 hours” based on the size of the Groovy blogosphere.). I’ve also implemented that “suppress more than 3 entries from same author” thing that Javablogs does.

I’ve come up with a nice taglib for doing “3 hours 14 minutes ago” or “30 minutes from now” date transformations. Very useful for the “Just In” and “Hot Entries” pages.

Wasted a stack of time on more GUI work including a site logo, a favicon (can recommend DynamicDrive’s cool little online tool) and color scheme work. I’m really working on improving my GUI skills, but it’s a long walk to freedom.

I’m also working on getting one of those coolish looking Web 2.0 site logos happening, but the best I can come up with so far is something like:

All the standard stuff like on-schedule site aggregation and parsing is all working a treat, but I want to keep some time up my sleeve for load testing. Might end up putting in a little caching service for the home page? But I’ll investigate whether it’s an issue first.

With only a little over 5 hours to go, the biggest thing to finish is the “My Profile” page where you can add/delete/update feeds. The Ajaxy part of this page has been burning a bit of time, but has been a great learning experience. I reckon I could blow another two hours on that getting it right. I’m keen to investigate what might be possible with the JSON builder… Stay tuned.

Once that’s done, it’s just the CSS of the tabs on the front page, a little “login” portlet replacing the current login page, and some serious testing. I’ll be working hard to have it out the door before the end of the month. Phew!