new ui features and some frustrations

July 16, 2007

Today I added a contact page to hamtesting.com, so as people begin to use the site for studying for their amateur radio licenses they can contact me if they have problems. ( i suppose that’s obvious enough but i’m tired. So leave me alone )

I’ve also added in support for displaying images to the users while they are taking their practice tests so that they don’t need to have sheets of paper at their side while they are taking the tests. This is an obvious feature and I knew it needed to be done before release, but I didn’t have the images ready to deploy to the website so I didn’t implement the feature.

Additionally, I have added in answer selection highlighting, and adjusted things so that the user can click on either the submit button for an answer, or click on the answer text that is highlighted to answer their questions. Not really a whizbang feature but easy enough to do, and eases the burden for the mouse challenged ;-).

The practice tests are certainly useful, but they weren’t the main point of what I was trying to do when I built this site. I wanted to put together a web-based version of the tools that I wrote for my own use when I was studying for the tests. Unfortunately, I think that the way I chose to go with the practice tests isn’t necessarily reusable for building the review tools that I want to put together.

I suppose it’s not a big deal, I can deal with it, things are clean enough that I can rewrite the parts that need to be rewritten with ease, i’m just a little annoyed with myself. See, I knew this was going to be an issue when I started writing the other stuff, but I chose to avoid it, I didn’t want the question sets stuffed into a database ( I don’t have a good reason for that, I just didn’t want them in there. )

However, I’m starting to realize that to do most of the rest of the stuff I want to attempt I’m going to need a database, or spend a bunch of time in file reading/writing hell. I’ve come up with some other interesting ideas that I want to fiddle with once I have the question review stuff all knocked out.