A new year and lots more web work.

First of all, and the biggie, is adding on-line ticket sales to the BMTG site. All of this is being processed by PayPal. It’s now received committee approval and my final design has been tested today… hopefully it will all go live by the end of the week.

The back-end is a MySQL database containing two tables - one containing the ticket details and the other is a control table for the on-line charges. The ticket page then uses PHP to access the database and construct it’s content, including ticket tables, PayPal links and even writing the description at the top of the page to describe any processing fees (they currently intend to charge just a set charge per ticket bought on-line, but in case they want to do something more complex, such as add P&P fees or per-transaction fees, I’ve added that in).

However, how many sales it will generate I’m not sure about.. I remain sceptical (especially as there’s a 50p processing charge).

I’ve also changed the majority of the sites pages as I improve accessibility - nothing visually has changed, but a lot of code has been modified.

Meantime I’ve found a problem with my earlier change to make the YouTube code valid. It seems that when I blank the screen using script.aculo.us code, the YouTube video stays highlighted, getting the way of any photos displayed. This only occurs on one screen (the only one where video and photos are in close proximity) so I’ve had to change that back to the original YouTube code whilst I investigate further.

I don’t know what my hosting company has done recently but my access to phpMyAdmin has been a lot, lot quicker. Which is good.

I use the MySQL Query Browser wherever possible, but as that’s dependant on the table having a unique key before you can edit it, it’s restrictive. And I can’t use it at work.

Oh, and since changing my ISP to Zen, my FTP has been a helluvalot (I know it’s not a word) speedier as well.

Anyway, today, I’ve turned my attention to the BMTG website. I’ve been trawling through the style sheets and making a matrix of the colours I’m using. From that I could work out where I was being inconsistent with colouring. I’ve also had a play with some as well and made very improvements here and there. The Color Palette Generator was useful as well.