Weâ??ve ushered in a new year, and fittingly, thereâ??s a number of developments on the horizon that hold the promise of a better, easier to develop for, web…

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AIR Houston went off without a hitch, mostly at least. Brad finished the design Friday, but we noticed some contrast issues, so a little more tweaking was required before we were good to go.

Saturday, I had issues and didn’t end up getting to UH until 10am, which put us an hour behind on the template. I busted my butt and knocked out the main portion of the template by noon, and started on a quest to find a copy of IE6 to test/await my inevitable doom on (on a Mac now). Found one finally and viewed the horror that was our template in IE6. No fun. It actually wasn’t too bad, only requiring a few minor fixes, but we did have one really strange rendering bug in IE6 that took me a while to diagnose. For those out there still using IE6: upgrade or die.

I spent the rest of the day tweaking the template, doing some styling here and there on the content, and fixing any weirdness that occurred along the way. Everyone else was busy populating the content, validating pages, checking links, and such. I really appreciate the work the rest of the team did. They did a great job covering all the minutae that is always such a chore, and it was really nice to develop a template, and for once, see all the pages and content just magically appear.

Anyways, we were feeling pretty good 2 hours away from the deadline. Everything was looking pretty complete. After talking with Brad, we decided to go in a slightly different direction with our main CTAs. Instead of randomly rotating out 3 different ones, we decided to provide content specific graphics for each page. I spent the next hour modifying the template and incorporating our new CTA setup.

The last bit of the rally suddenly got extremely intense. We started noticing validation problems on some of our pages. Somewhere along the line someone had incorporated a Google map into the location page (which shouldn’t have been done anyways due to the lack of accessibility), which apparently does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. The paypal donate button, too, was causing validation errors, and to top it all off, the contact form we set up through the CMS we were using was not validating either.

We were able to fix most of the problems, but the map ended up being chucked and without time to add a static image version to replace it, which we were kind of disappointed about. In the end, we were able to finish the site with mere seconds to spare, and finally breathe.

The only unfortunate part is that we now have to wait 2 weeks to find out how we did. Anticipation.

Before the actual Rally day, you’re allowed to meet with your NPO (Non-Profit Organization), gather content, and create a design. Then, on Rally day, you spend 8 hours developing all the code for the site. This will be my first year participating in the event, but from what I hear, it’s a very intense day.

This year is unique in that a regional competition has been added. The winners from the three participating cities (Austin, Houston, and San Antonio) will go on to compete against each other.

Something else on my plate is exactly what I need right now, but I believe it will be a very worthwhile experience, and it’s also a chance to do some good, by giving a non-profit a strong, accessible presence on the web. Course, I’m not entirely enthused with the fact that Rally day falls within days of TipDish’s scheduled launch. That ought to be one killer weekend.

With that, I’m really done for the night.