Send me the date - Please!

I hate to admit it but at the moment I am totally stuck! I've been working on the snappy birthday game form again.
The form takes the customer's details and sends them to a PHP form handler, that sends an email to me and then, allows the customer to choose to upload images or just pay for their game. A 'send a birthday game product' is not working at optimum capability if it doesn't include a field for the recipient's DOB. This would allow me to make sure the game is sent on the correct date!
I had originally asked the customer to write the date in the special instructions text area on PayPal. I would prefer to get this info, in the email with all the other order details though. With this in mind I researched adding a pop up calendar to the form page and thought that the YUI calendar was my best bet. I followed the simple instructions and lo and behold the calendar widget is working perfectly.

1. The customer clicks in the birth date box and the pop up calendar displays
2. They select a date
3. the calendar closes
4. The DOB is displayed in a dynamic text field
5. they submit the form
6. The form handler parses the data
   
7. I receive the email with the appropriate details
8. I make a Snappy Birthday game according to the details
9. happy me :) happy customer :)

Unfortunately it only gets as far as 5! I have tried every way I can think of to get the date the customer selects and pass it to the PHP form handler and then by email to me.
The other details on the page are checked and sent when the form is submitted and if I could get at the value in the dynamic div... I'm sure it would work...
Otherwise, the customer will just have to enter the date in an input text field...
which might be easier all round, if not so pretty.
I decided just to let the customer enter the date, I've saved the YUI version in case I ever find out how to implement it.
I'm thinking of attempting to write a game in Processing. This will be an experiment to begin with but if I manage it, I might try some more game applets...

Good Idea or I'm Dottled

I've been thinking about what sets the Solundria RPG game apart from other RPG games. It seems most successful sites and games possess their own unique brand. Many brands have their own motto or mission statement too. There's even a cool mission statement generator, that can help you write your own.
"The customer can count on me, to enthusiastically create user friendly, "outside the box", content to delight my customers.
This might suit Solundria.
I was thinking of what does Solundria have, that other game producing companies don't have. They usually have a team that can work on different aspects of the web site; but Solundria just has me...
So what can I provide that other games companies cant?
That's when I came up with my next public relations campaign:
Solundria - One of the few games designed by a granny and offering prizes with a difference!
'Escape the hell that is Solundria and win a crocheted Amigurumi figure. You may also choose a Clever Clyde or the Rabbid Wombat exclusive!
cartoon
Lets face it, false modesty aside, at crocheting I kick ass! It will take the other game sites a good 6 months to learn the syntax and even start to compete! Grannies will be hired by the thousand in an effort to keep up with the demand. Name your price grannies and hide your design patterns from prying eyes!
We will hold conferences and give talks on the basics and then provide certifications in Tunisian Crochet and Hairpin Lace.
In the spirit of open source, I would mention that Lion Brand have made all their patterns free and this will give all developers a great source of inspiration! Yes Sega, you will have problems with Sonic's spikes but there is help out there! (for a hefty fee)
You say there's someone at the door with a white lace up jacket?
to be continued.....

Test -Test - and Test Again!

I could kick myself! Solundria had loads of extra traffic this week because I used a facebook voucher. All these visitors ready to try out the hell that is Solundria....and the link was broken!
That could explain why nobody has managed to escape the dungeon yet...
Its really put a downer on my day.
I cant understand why nobody let me know, maybe I need to provide more email links on the pages!

Woopra - Facebook - Google Web Optimiser

Woopra is a 'real-time Web tracking and analysis application' and it shows a lot of promise. They are looking for beta testers for their new release, so I applied, of course. There are web and desktop versions of the application and you can watch your visitors in real time.
Some of the capabilities of Woopra are very powerful and a lot of fun. You can see at a glance how many visitors are using which browser and the country they are in. There is even a facility which lets you use Google maps to zone in on where the signal is coming from, but I think this is more likely to be their ISP than their residence.
Live visitors on the site can be tagged so next time they log on you will recognize them.
The developers are working on a chat facility, which apparently lets you talk to your visitors. I really think this is something I will have to stop myself from using too much. I can just imagine someone coming to Solundria and me suddenly asking them why they didn't buy a Snappy Birthday Game! The thought of it is just so comical. There will also be an option to add a chat button to the site, so that visitors can talk to you when you are available. This sounds like a really valuable feature as I have little contact with my visitors. You can set it up to give audible alerts when you set it up to report certain events. I can see it now... Ding Dong "Someone is on the Birthday game page! Quick - get them tagged and then if they leave ask them 'Hey why u not buy a game!'hee hee the mind boggles!"
My ISP provided me with $25 of free Facebook vouchers and it really increased the traffic to the site. I set it up for the homepage but if I were to pay for more I think I would drop my visitors at the Snappy Birthday Pages.
Solundria has been really dead since the voucher ran out and the traffic has virtually stopped. In fact I've never seen a day this slow before. I haven't had one visitor today! This happened yesterday too but the traffic suddenly shot up to 25 later in the day. Something has changed how my hits are recorded and I will have to check this out.
I set up the Google Web Optimiser AB experiment on my home page too. This serves one of 2 different home pages each time a visitor arrives. Then it keeps a record of which page gets the most visitors to play Solundria. Using Google's web optimiser and woopra javascript code blocks on the same page may be slowing my traffic report but I really cant understand how this could be happening.
The optimiser will run until it has enough data but at this rate I'm not holding my breath!
I used slick map to make a site map and add it to my footer on all pages. This really helped me structure the site better and I;ve added more pages like "About Us" and "Principles"
Links to be added....

Redirections

The payment process has been rewritten and now includes captcha. This helps prevent crackers from using the form in some kind of batch attack. I added the facility to upload 3 card images. This was a good step as now its something that is standard and I dont need to get customers to send their images by email. I think the max file size needs adjusting, but we will see how it goes.
After getting everything working, I decided I should do a web site backup, just in case... I used wget, which backed up most of the site. I used Filezilla to get the parts wget couldn't reach.
I set up the Solundrian.com site, because some company was trying to get me to pay hundreds of pounds to get my old domain name Solundria.com. When the domain became available again, for under 10 pounds, I quiuckly bought it. At the moment it has an experimental layout and uses different pages, but its just confusing matters. The SnappyBirthday.co.uk domain is also sitting doing nothing. I need to find out the best way to redirect these domains to solundrian.com
I found the script I needed for the redirect at Sebastion's Pamphlets. This blog looks like it is worth reading as it has a lot of sensible advice on search engines etc. It explains how to implement the redirect so Google will understand you are not trying anything dodgy by using:
meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"
I uploaded the script and it is working well. Here's hoping google finds it ok and that there are no problems.
Next I changed the snappybirthday.co.uk link to work in much the same way and pointed it to the Snappy Birthday Game page.

PHP-Whats that again?

The host for Solundria does not support Java so I don't have access to Icefaces etc. I had the payment process set up to use Formail but the script on the host uses a default landing page and I need to have another form for uploading images and using PayPal. I have written the pages for the uploads but I need to change the payment process to PHP only. I'm sure there must be a way to send the images by email too, but I don't know it and I really want to be doing other things.
I have been putting off refining the payment process for so long... by documenting it here I might be forced to actually complete it this time!
Here is the workflow of the process:
1: The user arrives on the snap game page where they may try out the free snap games. If they like the idea of sending a Snappy Birthday Game they click the Place Order link.
2:The order form appears. This allows the customer to enter their details. On my last tinkering attempt I managed to break this page so my number one priority is to fix this first!
I used to have a really good PHP editor called PHP2000 or something but it went commercial and I just cant justify the outlay at the moment.
I used SciTE to edit the php and found a really good online syntax checker which allowed me (eventually), to switch the page to just use PHP to send email.
Everything seems to be working correctly now but I need to check the orders are being sent correctly by email!
The orders are getting through ok but I need to find a way of keeping track of which details belong to which images. Also the customers email address is not being sent so this will also require fixing.
3: When the form details are submitted the upload images page is displayed. This allows a customer to upload up to 3 images which can be included in the birthday game. This is working as intended, but I am using a last name input to match images to details and I don't have a last name field on the details page...
Almost there though!