Tax Project March Wrap up
So I cheated a bit and pushed the deadline out a week. While much of the checklist is done the project overall is nowhere near where I hoped it would be. The issue I think was that I assumed that I would be productive for the whole weekend but it turns out I actually do do social stuff and regular maintenance like cleaning or ironing. Looking back I think I committed about half the time I expected to.
Tax website screenshot
Target features
- Templating system
Check. Using TT2 as described earlier. The templating isn’t complete but I was
always planning on growing it as I went. Sadly it doesn’t properly implement the
primatives I’m using but It’s good to start with a win, even if you steal it. - Basic layout
Check. To start off with I had a ghastly colour scheme of different shades of red and roughly the layout I ended up with. I read on one of those innumerable website design blogs that colour schemes are important. All the classic mood stuff, red is firey and aggresive, white is serious, boring and reliable. Reliable seems like a good mood for a tax website but black and white is a bit too hard for someone as inept as I to pull off. So I went with a cream background and a yellow/browny secondary colour.
- Functional data entry
Check. This works pretty well actually, change an input box and it’s immediately pushed to the server. Not perfect (none of the code is), notably it’s not fully backgrounded so you get a slight delay.
- Javascript data checking
Fail. I didn’t get around to trying this.
- Serverside storage
Check. I went with MongoDB and it’s going well so far. Ended up having to write a very simple PHP script to expose the DB to the Javascript, primarily authentication wrapping.
- Basic calculations
Partial. I have some calculations working but it’s not a reusable structure.
- Independent domain name
Fail. The project isn’t far along enough to be useful yet so the domain isn’t important, so I’m marking this as a fail but don’t care. I also couldn’t find a free name I liked.
- Public source repository
Maybe features
- Client side encryption
Fail. Didn’t start on this.
- User login system
Check. Pretty easy to implement with the DB layer in place. I don’t have user creation working yet but that is actually a fairly small amount of work.
- Basic personal tax pack covered
Fail. I’m nowhere near achieving this, it’s crazy how much they cram into a few pages.
- Client side PDF generation
Fail. Didn’t start on this.