Left the previous domain...

Well I couldn't justify owning the ben.best domain, it was £70 a year that I could spend on other things. Especially as I own benbat.com. So welcome to the new domain.

I've also got as far as I'm going to with the Lunch project. I learnt some bits and it stopped being quite as much fun. I may well return to it in the future, but for now I'm moving onto new and exciting other projects...

Tonight my bit of work was to move the blog, as we've seen previously that can be a lot of hassle, however this time things appear to have "just worked".

The near future I've got some plans to play with "groovy" and docker, but mostly the idea is to write up fun techy things that I'm doing.

did I say I was finished?

So this evening has been fun working on the app (lunch.ben.best)

I've got some things working, I've also decided the way I need to move forward so:
New features:
You can now by clicking on it modify the serving date / time of the meal.
I've started on, though it's not entirely there the work to add a new meal, there's lots more to be added there, but I have a plan.

It's still really interesting to return to things that I worked with a long time ago and some of the bits are really clever, getting the checking working so that it validates dates, some of the other bits that "just work". However I think I'm going to have to split out a lot of the Meteor functions so that they are separate to some of the helper methods for the steps or meals functionality. Returning to the "time" object that I'd worked on was a nice feeling of finding something I'd done nicely in the past.

I think when I next get some time it will be time to add to the wireframes.

I'm currently waiting at the hospital for a scan (nothing serious), and it's the run in to Christmas, so I'm guessing updates will be quite sporadic.

broke it again...

Continuing with the let's see how bad I can mess it up plan that I've been working with so far, this evening I've fixed one thing and really broken lots of others.


I now have an app that although it correctly describes things so has got rid of the depends on rubbish and replaced it with done before which is what I needed it to be. Unfortunately it won't now let you save a new step (and I don't like that description either).

In positive news I can continue playing tomorrow so I'll hopefully at least get something saving.

I did this evening manage to get some things right. I  managed to get rid of a load of the errors that I was having to ignore in the code.  These weren't actual errors, they were jslint (a tool for telling you where you've written your code badly) not being told to correctly ignore some errors.  I'd previously tried to fix this and failed, actually getting this fixed meant I could see the proverbial wood for the trees and pointed out some actual problems that I'd been missing because I'd ignored all the errors.

The other thing that this has pointed out is that I really (really really) need to add in some unit testing.  This is starting to get embarrassing, I don't actually know exactly when I broke saving things, I think it was this evening, I can role back code changes and find out but that's a faff. Proper unit tests would have highlighted this to me as soon as I broke it.  Fortunately I pointed this out about 3 months ago, less fortunately I paid no attention.

As a sort of PS you might have noticed that I turned ads off.  The reason for this was that I no longer needed them. I'd played with them, figured out how to get them working and better than that realised how to set them up and how to turn them off.

I've checked in the current (broken code base) here:
https://github.com/benjimouse/lunch

ahhh... not as "there" as I thought it was

So following my proud post declaring I was sort of there, I pointed out what I'd done to a "friend". He pointed out a small flaw in my logic and that the tool was completely unusable...

It's clear now that instead of having a "depends on" (which really means nothing) I need two boxes: - "Needs to be done before" and "Needs to be done after".  Ah well it'll give me a better idea of what I'm doing and no doubt cause some fun with the idea of circular dependencies...

Oh well gives me something to do tonight!

marking things as done (and not doing things!)

Well it was an interrupted couple of hours but it was a couple of hours...
I have added the ability to mark steps as done (or to undo said marking).  I've also added some "beautification" and started to get rid of some of the css that had been given with one of the tutorials.

I'm quite pleased with where I've got to, it's going to lead nicely into tomorrow's playing with dependencies (or at least hopefully tomorrow).  If you want to see the new functionality it is (as ever) at lunch.ben.best you'll need to be logged in to mark things as done / undo them.  There are a few bits that I'm not really that happy with:

• The layout doesn't quite feel right, mostly the second part that will contain the details of the dependencies.
• The button labels: "done" and "undo", better suggestions are more than welcome
• Logged in / not logged in bits not quite working as I would have expected.
• I thought I'd added a deny rule that I would have needed to change to stop me doing exactly what I've done.

Of the these it's the last one that concerns me most, however I need to do quite a bit of playing with the security and ownership bits so I'm sure it'll all come out in the wash.  Overall I'm quite pleased with the progress I've made over the last couple of nights.

In other news I now know what I'm cooking meat-wise for Christmas lunch - a 2 kg turkey crown and a piece of topside.  The topside is being provided by my parents in law so I'll not know exactly the weight of that until they arrive on Friday.
For posterity here's a screen show of the current look:

To the things not done, I made a deliberate decision to not write a "so you want to..." post tonight, I was in the mood for keeping going with the lunch project.