Help me test

[ZapBulletRider]

Just about done with my Dad's website (the only thing left is ability to pay for your cart). The thing is the backend is very complex, and I need to do a lot of testing before I'm comfortable going live w/ it. Occasionally when debugging in VS .NET I'll get errors, but when I publish the site, I don't get them (I think it has something to do with things moving slower in debug mode). Anyway what I need is for some bored people out there to try to break it. Click all over the place, go back and forth in galleries, and see if you can get an error. If you do, tell me what you were doing when you got it (what gallery you were in, what pic if you can remember). You'll get to see some cool photos of the OBX in the process.

http://whitmell.webhop.net/raymatthews

And also let me know if you have suggestions. Keep in mind he requested it be very simple, visually, so as not to detract from the pictures. Also he hasn't decided what he wants on the front page. Also, it looks better in IE, but the functionality should all be there in Mozilla as well.

[ZapBulletRider]

oh also, some of the prices & dimensions aren't set up for a few of the pics, still waiting on my dad for those

also, I know "Morning Beach" is a red X, the pic he sent me seemed too grainy so I didn't convert it, but I went ahead and entered it in the database so I wouldn't forget it later.

[unorthadox]

I'll check er out.

edit:
zbr, it all looks good so far. the only thing i noticed was that if you click say, 3 notecards for a picture that you want, then click next to whatever the next notecard you want, it has 3 as the default instead of 1. not sure if that is planned, but thought i'd let you know.

great pictures though

[ZapBulletRider]

I'll check er out.

edit:
zbr, it all looks good so far. the only thing i noticed was that if you click say, 3 notecards for a picture that you want, then click next to whatever the next notecard you want, it has 3 as the default instead of 1. not sure if that is planned, but thought i'd let you know.

great pictures though

wait could you explain this one a little more? are you talking about the cart?

edit: oh, you mean in the dropdown where you select quantity? Yeah, that's the default for a static dropdownlist, to maintain previous state, and I went ahead and left that there intentionally. Also this reminds me that I have to put a blurb to specify that this is a set of 8 different cards, not an a la carte thing, you can't "make your own" notecard set. I forgot to put that in there.

Yes, these are the kinds of things that help me find details I missed. When you code something like this over an entire year, you end up missing some things.

[unorthadox]

True true. The cart worked fine for me, other than the fact I couldn't find the checkout button (obviously) ahha

[ZapBulletRider]

yeah I thought my dad would want to integrate an online merchant pay service (like Verisign) which would make my job easy. He doesn't want to pay the fees though, which means I need to write a secure page to accept CC info, then encrypt it into the database, then write an admin page where he can view each order with CC info.

[omi one]

Good work. I went through with no problems. Then again, I'm just your average consumer. It was very easy to use.

[ZapBulletRider]

thanks, I tried to design it with the average consumer in mind. A lot of the people using it may only have 800x600 resolution, and don't want to scroll a lot, which is why I put in the ability to change # of pics on a page. Glad to see you had no errors, I haven't been getting any unless I'm debugging, except every now and then one will pop up. Usually hitting refresh will fix it though, which is weird.

[jake]

yeah.. no problems here. the about the artist is all picture... ewwwww hahah

[HandsomeJonneh]

Yeah right, ZBR. We all just know you suck at photoshop.

But nice coding. I love it.

I love you.

[ZapBulletRider]

I know, he sent me that pic to use for the blurb and I was too lazy to type it so I just put it up there. I kind of like the contrast of the white & light gray though, I may end up keeping it. I know what you mean though.

[lunarone]

picture number 58, in the fine art photograph section, morning beach, is red X'ed out.

[ZapBulletRider]

Yeah right, ZBR. We all just know you suck at photoshop.

But nice coding. I love it.

I love you.

I love you, and everything in your general vicinity. You should see the backend code. The gallery, the menu ,the cart, the cart icon, everything's user controls. The whole site is built from scratch (that's why it took me so long) Can you say "component oriented"? The cart is actually a gridview using an ObjectDataSource (you should look into this - SO SICK) displaying an enumerable type List<> of the custom business class CartItem, which exposes public properties (like quantity, dimension_id, pic_id, etc). That list comes from a class called CartList, and your cart as you browse is actually a reference to a CartList instance stored in a session variable. As you're browsing through, and click Add to Cart, it pulls the CartList instance out of session, calls CartList.Add(<some params>), then stores the updated instance back into the session variable.

The gallery is a user control that gets added to a page with one tag:
<ThumbGall:Gallery id="thumb_gallery" runat="server" currPage="notecards" PageSize="12" />
Within the user control itself it has all the business logic to use that "currPage" tag and go to the data access class and retrieve the appropriate gallery dataset. To add new pics to a gallery, all you need is to create the image & thumb, stick them in the images folder, write a row in the Pictures table with title, pic name, thumb nm (like blahblah.jpg), sequence (so you can change up the sorting if you want), category (char(1) that determines which gallery it appears in), and pic type (an ID that maps to a reference table which is referenced in a cross reference table that maps pic types to dimensions/prices. So like "S" would be "Standard", and would have 3 records in the Pic_Dimensions_XRef table that map S to the dim_id for a 5x7, the dim_id for a 8x12, and the dim_id for a 12x18. "O1" would be "Odd Size 1", etc. That way each pic's dimensions dropdownlist is individually populated on the fly using the info associated w/ that pic_id's pic_type.). Then once you've entered that little row for each new pic, the app is restarted, b/c all the galleries are Cached to minimize database calls. Before it goes live I will make a little admin page where you can click a button and clear the cache.

This thing has been a beast but it's all reusable, I only need to change a couple small things to make it independent of my dad's stuff (the dataaccess layer is called RayData). Then I will probably make a site like this of my own.

I know I'm rambling but I wanted to spill this out on some people who actually code, my wife tunes me out when I talk about this and my dad only cares about what he sees, not what's going on in the backend. I'm just so stoked this works now, I'm not exaggerating when I say I used pretty much every single .NET and object-oriented concept I've ever learned on this one app.

[HandsomeJonneh]

Can you say "component oriented"?

Component Oriented

ps, sick job. looks extremely complicated like it should be.

[tcmarkley]

What kind of camera does he use...if you dont know....call him. Now.

[BART]

i dont like the font you used on the 'to do list'. you should really use something nicer, less defaut looking.

[omi one]

picture number 58, in the fine art photograph section, morning beach, is red X'ed out.

We got a winner!!!!!

[BART]

p.s. just kidding


p.p.s. nerd.

[BART]

the about the artist page loads slower than mollasses, im not sure why.

could be my 2400 baud modem.

[ZapBulletRider]

could be that it's a big image instead of being text, like it eventually will be. I was just lazy. And Thomas, I'll ask him. I know that he finally switched to Canon, and I imagine it's probably about the most expensive one you can get, b/c it's a tax write-off for him and his most important possession. Also I'll be in Nags Head all weekend. 757-692-9642 if you're there and want to skim. As usual, I won't be able to drop everything and go whenever, but I will definately be skimming a lot more than last time.

[ZapBulletRider]

Thomas, he said he's got the Canon EOS something Mark II. And for what it's worth, the surf in NH this weekend was sick. The only shitty part is on Sat. I had 3 hours to skim and I wasted a whole hour driving all the way up to Bird street by KHP only to end up back at Enterprise, which blew away every other spot I checked (including Hayman). Just a heads up on that spot. It was sick south swell backside liners for 2 hours straight. The next day the wind switched to NE and after a full day of that, I skimmed Sun evening on sloppy but fun north swell frontside liners. Plus the water was near 70 by that point and this really pretty blue-green. It was a good weekend meng.

[Walruz996]

1d?

[ZapBulletRider]

I guess so, I just went to canon's website and there's only 1 Mark II, well I guess there's some "N" version. I don't know which he has, but they both have the same name except for the "N".

[(S3)]

I got stuck in the Calendar section. Not by any bug or glitch, but that photography is plain amazing. The photo of the rainbow (not necessarily partial to rainbows, for the record) over the ocean was stunning.....

My only problem was the "business card" style layout on the "About" page, but that's subjective........

S3

[ZapBulletRider]

yeah like I said, he sent me that image for the about me, I think that's a page he prints out to leave at galleries that have his work, and he wanted me to take the text off of there for the about me, and to use the pic of him from there. In the interest of getting things up there quickly, I just stuck the whole image up there temporarily. I thought about leaving it, but seeing as how more than one person's commented on it, I'll do what I originally planned to do with it.

And yeah S3, he just gave me the pics for that 2k7 calendar last week, and I love that rainbow picture. But what really takes it for me is the lightning picture. It looks like a composite but it's a straight photo.

[tcmarkley]

He may have the same one I have....unless he dropped $7k on the 1Ds. I just upgraded to the 1D Mark II N.

Yes, skim was super sick....the spot to be this weekend was first street. You should have called me up.