Little bugs, hidden features, and lots of chatting – Week 11

This week has been full of lots of odd jobs for KnowledgeNow. I’ve fixed up the breadcrumbs, added a visual response for a failed feedback submission, cached the navigation data, split the search box out into a partial layout for re-usability, and submitted the project for a code review. The feedback I got from Andy was really useful, and it was reassuring to have somebody else more experienced check over my work.

I think what’s surprised me most about this week has been the amount of talking I’ve done. I’ve discussed how we’ll integrate the website into the existing iSolutions site with Pat, I’ve discussed navigation and template issues with Graeme, and I’ve talked with the Service Management team about integration with Service Now and how we plan on logging search queries and view counts. I’ve decided to even hold a demo of KnowledgeNow for the Service Management team and some of the interns next week to get feedback on it. It will only be a couple of days before I leave, so there probably won’t be enough time to take into account everyone’s feedback but it will be nice to know what people think and to leave a future plan for the team to further develop this.

The information we plan on logging goes beyond my current knowledge of web development, with recording IP addresses, user agents, and search queries along with the id of the article being viewed. It will involve using sessions, something that Martin tells me is trivial but I’ve learnt not to underestimate seemingly small tasks like this, and I look forward to tackling this first thing on Monday morning.

It seems the closer to completing this project I get the slower progress is, things like logging and custom error pages that I expected to be relatively straight forward aren’t, and there aren’t so many easy jobs to fill my time waiting other people or to tackle when my brain gets tired. The learning curve continues, and the list of little jobs to do before going live keeps going, with a new item popping up every time I cross one off. My final week of working for iSolutions will most likely be a frantic race to get my project well and truly production ready, and a battle to prove to the people in charge that they should put it out there.