Tuesday, October 28, 2008

First update of 2008

This year's Invent Team is, as many of you may know, continuing the Garden Consultant from last year. We've already started on many of our goals for this year.

What are these goals, you ask? Well, for starters we plan to streamline the website, making it easier to use and providing more functionality to it. The updated control panel is on the site, and will be functional shortly. We'll be adding Google Maps to the site for gardening store locations, and hopefully weather updates as well. Speaking of weather updates, we plan to have a weather advisory system in place as well, so that registered users will receive an E-Mail alert for frosts, droughts, high winds and other weather conditions in their area that may harm a garden. Google Reader will also be used to provide a visually appealing link to this blog. It is not yet on the site, but we have it working.

On the programing side of things, we have implemented object oriented Perl to allow for greater ease in creating uniform web pages. We will also be using Javascript to increase functionality and appearances of the site. For example, Java will detect what time of year it is, and change the background accordingly. It will also detect a users browser to warn about possible errors arising from using outdated versions of Internet Explorer.

There are many other things that are planned for this year but we have not yet started on. All in all, we hope to make the site easier to use and less cluttered. That's all for now!


P.S.-Posts will also start being every other day from now on to keep everyone updated.

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