Suzanne Boben

Ho…lee… Hannah Batman, I’m fixing stuff left and right. Usability is a strong driver for me. Things need to be simple, obvious and easy to use. Granted, the form to run a chart can be overwhelming for premium subscribers – so many options! But we’ll figure that out later. I made so many changes and updates, and fixed so many lingering bugs in the last 24 hours that I’ve even surprised myself! We’re getting there! Public beta soon! Continue »

Let me see if I can list everything I’ve done or changed or fixed. I should really keep track, but I get down these rabbit holes of activity and I don’t come out for hours.

✅ Asteroid Selection

The big change today was the rewrite of the asteroid selection list in both the chart and report form, and the user preferences page. In your Account » Preferences, I allow you to set default values for numerous charting items … things like the default country, theme, wheel style, report sections … and I also let you set the default asteroids that should be checked every time you view the chart and report form. These defaults make using the form faster and easier. You’ll likely use the same values most of the time so if you haven’t set defaults in your account preferences, do that.

For asteroids, I changed the way the groups, or tags work. When I add a new asteroid to the database, I tag it with keywords that indicate the asteroid’s general influence. Maybe it represents ambition, courage and perseverance. If you’re running a chart and you want to include asteroids that focus on topics like this, you can now select a keyword from the select dropdown and I highlight all the asteroids in the list that were tagged with that keyword. See the image below.

You can see in the image that I selected the tag/keyword “love” and the asteroids tagged with that keyword were highlighted. This makes it easier to select the asteroids you want in your chart. Some keywords won’t highlight any asteroids yet. I have a number of asteroids that aren’t live yet – they need glyphs – but their keywords appear in the select nevertheless.

There are links under the select that allow you to select all asteroids in that group, or deselect them all. This is handy, for example, when you want asteroids tagged with “courage” and “feminine”. First select everything tagged with “courage”, then choose “masculine” from the dropdown and click the Deselect All link. That will leave you with only those asteroids that were tagged with courage and feminine. Every asteroid should be tagged as either masculine or feminine, making it easy to focus on one or the other through selection and deselection.

Creating a usable asteroid selection list is hard. I worked for about 8 hours building a complex selection drawer, only to realize in the end, the complexity just made it worse. I realized what was really necessary was a way to easily see which asteroids belongs to which groups. I settled on this solution so we’ll see how people like it. It works in both the account preferences page and the chart and report form.

✅ Astrology Page Rework

I’m not a fan of complexity. I had a page for presets and a page for the charting form and then the astrology page on top of that, that was supposed to act like a dashboard. I merged all three. The presets page still exists, but only for creating and editing presets. There’s no direct link to it in the header menu anymore. If you manually hit the page, you’ll still see the presets table, but there’s no need to do that. The table is nicely displayed right on the Astrology page now and works the same way. That table was AJAXified last week so no page reloads are necessary for any of the table actions. Even sorting and searching is all dynamic.

The chart and report form is now visible on this page as well. Premium users can switch between the presets view and the form view with the buttons provided. Those with free accounts will only see the form. Again, the link in the header menu, to the chart and report page was removed. You can hit the page manually if you want but there’s no need.

✅ Account Nickname

I fixed the bug that prevented a user from setting and saving a nickname. Nicknames can be set, and then used as the display name for any comments you leave on blog posts, so if you want to participate in comments, but want to remain anonymous, set a nickname and then select it as your Signature. Additionally if you want me to link to your personal website, add your website’s URL in the URL field.

✅ HTML Output Updates

For non-transit charts with reports, I centered the name data at the top, balancing the display of the content.

✅ Mobile Display Fixes

Numerous mobile CSS fixes. You crazy people who insist on viewing websites on your tiny phone screens will be happy. I still have to change the Account tabs so they don’t cause problems, but I’ll get to that later today.