Indablog

I’m working to adapt the interactive ballot at Demochoice.org for the ranked voting part of this system. Things started well, but I’m still dealing with a dymanic javascript creation routine. For the time being it looks like that feature will add a lot of code to the published page. At some point down the line, maybe I’ll be able to move the code off the page with AJAX.

The Demochoice.org creator, Dave Robinson, has done quite a job. He’s thought through lots of things I’d like to do here under blue sky conditions, including private invitations to elections. If this gets anyhwere I’ll be obliged to say that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. Unlike Robinson, though, I’m not an advocate of Instant Runoff Voting in the public sphere. More on that later.

The bad news is that I’ve discovered that the quadruple_blue skin bombs on IE 6. It looks fine on Firefox 1.5 and IE 7, and I haven’t tried anything else. I like the scheme, and I’ll have to take a stab at fixing it up somehow.

There were some other hitches in creating stored procedures on my host’s system. My scripts loaded locally, but not on the host. TOAD’s procedure and function options won’t perform on the host either. Dreamhost’s phpMyadmin interface does no better. But MySQL’s Query Builder works OK. Once I got through that, I learned you need to add certain parameters in the php MYSQLconnect statement in order to call a sproc’s result set. It’s tempting to just cut to the chase and revert to select statements and such, but that wouldn’t measure up as a Best Practice. This stuff sure can get tedious.

Filed under: Development Chronicles