I’ve been working this weekend to bring you some new features here. Once I get it all working, you’ll be able to submit your own complaints, and view the complaints of others. It will be pretty low-tech at the beginning. It will probably involve you emailing me through a form on the site, and then I’ll add your complaint somewhere. The goal eventually is to take me out of the equation, and allow you to interact somehow with the complaints of others.
To that end, I’ve been working in Prado, a PHP framework. I started using them because they offered AJAX support, and you can’t be a cool website without AJAX, right? But it turns out that AJAX was supported in version 2.X, and will be again in 3.1, but the current version is 3.05, and it does not really have any AJAX support. I thought about going back to 2.X, but then I’d have to redo things when 3.1 came out, which they claim should be in about two weeks. So, thanks to Mo for showing me how to upgrade to PHP5 on Dreamhost (Great inexpensive web hosting company, by the way), and I’ll get the new stuff out as soon as I can.
This also gives me the opportunity to say how much I like developing on my Ubuntu box using a lighttpd server. For some of you, I know this is like a foreign language, but I honestly thought you stopped reading when I started talking about Prado. Anyway, it was a real personal accomplishment for me to get PHP 5 and Prado installed on lighttpd and have a small web app up and running over the weekend. I’m quite pleased with myself, actually. While I do web development for a living, the server configuration and things like that are not my strong suit (Or even, really, my suit at all). I never really learned anything about managing a server, and our enviroment at work was set up before I got here. So I’m just going to pat myself on the back here for figuring it out and getting it all working.