Tuesday, June 5, 2007

18 Bugs and Climbing

As we prepare to invite beta testers to our site, the list of bugs found by the Piffany team and some of our friends (thanks to those of you who have been helping) is at 18 and climbing at last count. We have fixed six of these, and are working our way down the list. This is really a lot of work!

Most annoying bug: Browser compatibility, hands down. Since this is obviously going to be a problem, it would be great if we could see what our users are seeing. I found a tool online that looks promising. TapeFailure is a nice Web 2.0 analytics application that records screencasts (videos) of users interacting with your web page. I don't know if it will work for us, since we do not serve static pages only, but I think we will try it out. If anyone knows of a free, or cheaper, version of this then let me know.

Most Bizarre bug: I implemented the advanced logic modules over the weekend and they worked fine through my administrative portal (a separate server available only from my computer that allows me to explore the databases behind Piffany in more detail), but some of the features didn't work at all through the public front-end even though the snippets of code were the same. I fixed the problem by deleting the old back-end search server and copying the administrative server in its place. Advanced logic allows you to input logical operators like AND, OR, and NOT (quotation marks for exact phrase matching) in order to refine search results. Users can use them by typing uppercase operators alongside search tokens, e.g., Harry NOT Potter, but we are seeking ways to implement them automatically or at least in an easier fashion so kids can use them.


Well, there are probably 19 bugs by now, so I had better get back to work.

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