Wow, what a day.

Today I finished modifying the code behind the web page to actually use the dates entered via the calendar picker. It works, if somewhat buggily.

After that, I worked for a while on a version of the calendar that would highlight the range the user had chosen. I had expected it to be a few minor changes, but it just got more and more complicated until I realized that it wasn't really worth it. I was spending hours trying to work out all these bugs for the sole sake of a bit of highlighting. So we will stick with the version where you just click 2 separate dates.

Right now I am cleaning up the calendar and web page interface. I used <noscript> tags to display a message and an alternate way of entering the data, should the user access the page with javascript disabled. I set up the calendar to be hidden by default (using CSS), and it is displayed via a javascript call when the page loads. This way, the page will make sense to the user whether or not they have javascript enabled. Those who do will see the calendar and no extra junk; those who don't won't even see the calendar.

I'll continue prettying up the page tomorrow. Once I have the front end smoothed out, that will probably be the point at which I start cleaning up the back-end code (which has become quite cluttered with all these changes) and stamping out some remaining bugs.

I copied the files to make a new version of the calendar. (I need to ask Nate sometime about getting subversion set up.) I learned a neat new command combination:

ls -R | grep someword

This basically searches all filenames recursively for any that contain someword. You're piping the output of the ls command into the grep command. I couldn't get it to work at first because I was putting a * on the end of the grep command like I usually do to indicate that it should search everything.

Notes to self for tomorrow:

Documents: 

• jul13_2 - mostly calendar stuff
  
• that same master todo list, afterwards
• Cleaning up interface, then cleaning up backend code and debugging