Design, Programming, Music and Life

Sunday, June 3, 2012

A life on the line

5:07 PM Posted by Unknown , , , , , , , , No comments
I'm trying to make myself remember to post more often, but it doesn't always happen the way I want it. This is also because I am trying to remind myself to stop working and spend more time with my Wife and kids. So it is a double edged sword, so to speak.

On the subject of employment and work, I have been happily helping out a local limo and party bus rental company with a couple websites they run. This job has been running for a couple weeks now, and I'm making a lot of progress on their sites. So far, I have mostly finished fixing all the issues with one site. The only thing left on that is adding a payment feature that somehow ties in to an old, unsupported version of Vacation Rental Script 4 (VRS4). And to make things worse, the PHP for the system has been obfuscated, and there is no record of the key... Well, there is that brick wall... So I have come up with a couple options for this: a) Pass the variable for current_property_rate to another system, like Paypal or Authorize.net, but I would have to set up a second site to handle just that one function, like a simple, but expandable Joomla site with a shopping cart and payment component. Or b) I could put a different custom package into each of the rental property listings that will just shortcut to a paypal or authorize.net payment form, but that will require me to calculate both a downpayment and pay in full number for every property by hand, and continue to do so for each new property. I so wish I could just add a payment function to this site as is. :(

Now that I am thoroughly depressed again, let's move on to some of the positive things I have done with the sites. I started a new Joomla site for the Rental Property site, already finished redoing the logo and designing a template for it. Added slideshow, payment, and rental property organization to the site already, and it will look great once I get the properties in there. But that requires a new expensive component that we are holding off on till I am ready. On the Limo and Partybus rental site, I have already finished building The site and getting 90% of the article info and links into the site. All I have to do on that is format the pages, and move the 100's of photos to a slideshow, sorted by article. On this site, I was able to build a seamless experience from mobile to full desktop browser, with no change in the UI. This is great for them, because it kills two birds with one stone, and saves me some time down the road as well as them some time in the future.

I still have to add up the time I spent on the web sites today, and get that sent out, but I at least got a whole lot of work done on it all this week, despite me being out of commission till Wednesday. I also got to save a friend from a live or death experience too! He had gone and updated his computer to the new Windows 8 release preview, and had lost years of photos in the process, so it was only a matter of time for the poor guy, before his wife would end his life for him, saving him the trouble of having to to do it himself. Me, being the nice guy I am, put my skills to work and was able to recover all the photos plus all of his documents and downloads too. Took me about 15 minutes, so not bad on time consumption. I am glad though that the fix was an easy one and he didn't actually loose everything in the long run. LOL, even though the thought of his wife beating him up is rather amusing.

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