President of the Earth

About President of The Earth

Dan Wygant blogs here about the development effort for this simple example of using the dot-Net framework to build a site in an Agile process.
The site is meant to provide the ability to vote for a daily election of the President of the Earth. You can use the gridview on the main page to vote once a day. If you want to know more, check the FAQ and the Usage pages.

Updated 12/11/2007

One of my best time savers, although not pretty, is to not putz with style until the end of the road... or near to it.
What I mean is that I initially don't do much styling at all - much less in a theme, CSS style sheet, or skin. Instead I begin with nothing but moving parts - focus on getting the hard stuff working so the system is "complete". By complete, I mean CRUD. Create, Read, Update, Delete. And that there is a way forward.
Not just any way forward, some things are known when from the start, some things are not. The point being, setup a framework you can easily modify moving fast forward without affecting other code. The first tactic is no doubt using Master pages to avoid reusing the same template HTML over many pages.
So in the end if there are changes to make with style or alignment or new pieces of HTML, then only the master has to be changed.
But this also follows with style. In my experience doing Agile/XP/RAD or whatever the latest name for kick ass development in a short time... Whenever I'm involved in RAD, the styles are refactored a few times:

Starting in tables, divs, controls, adding placement style like width, height, and alignment to control placement.
Going further with visual appeal style like color and font, as well as images, still local to the html - at least initially.
Gradually moving the initially working styles into a theme, CSS style sheets, or skin files.
Adding more styles local to the HTML, and immediately refactoring into the theme. Ultimately, not even using styles local, just in the CSS of the theme.
Finally reviewing all pages looking for any styles to move to the theme.

This saves time because initially you get familiar with what is working quickly, and finally feeling confident enough to work only in your theme CSS styles.
This saves doubly in that you don't waste time (aka spin) trying to figure out the look and feel before you really know what the entire thing will look like. It's better to gradually add more style slowly and once a "critical mass" of styles are appearing, still fairly early, develop a theme.
As time moves on, and more styles are generated, more and more of the styles work will occur directly in the theme instead of at the page level. That too saves lots of time, as you've gotten used to the styles for the controls you are using, and can call them out without thinking. The real timesaver is that, you will not have to go change a number of pages to get styles to match up.
You've used a style class for instance, and once you change it, all the pages which use the style reflect it without further modifications.

With that said, time to get to refactoring this site

Updated 12/10/2007

I've put this together simply to find a way of having world-wide consensus. Well, to start with it is an experiment in using the features of ASP.NET 2005 in a practical way. What the point was originally was to have a place to demonstrate programming tricks. One of the main things was to use these technologies:

AJAX - no postback makes for no flash when the webpage updates; more like Winforms.
Google Adsense - money for clicks. One rational to build something the entire world would like to participate in every day.
Sql Server 2005 - using table adapters from User Defined Data Sets.

So far so good. I've got the following things working:

Nominations: you have to have someone to vote for before you can vote
Voting: click the button that says "Vote"
Results: viewing who won when shows a pagable detail for each day
FAQ: how to do the above

Some of the site may look paltry, but one additional point to this entire thing is to keep track of how it was done and reproduce the same process, and hope others try it as well. One initial key to webwork is simply finding a good yet inexpensive host. ServerSea is that for me. Use this link, you too can build a site like this.

Updated 11/07/2007

Once upon a day, there was a person, myself, Dan Wygant. It was that day a database appeared in the ServerSea, allowing the entire population of the Earth to vote for the President of the Earth.

However, with the luck of the day the only person who was voting was I and thus, wishing for that office for a day I voted.

Now in the days that followed others grew to know of the PrezOfTheEarth.com website and it became a way of, in one day, who would be best consider as our elected, voted for, President of the Earth. So as each day has passed, I've tried to see to it that yet another great human gets the chance to be the President of the Earth, if just for a day. That day was indeed special for me. I hope you too can find the right leader for our great Earth, only of course if you vote.

Thanks,
Dan Wygant

You too can build a site like this; click here and make your life simpler.