Well, after getting a barrage of email complaining that my Free Job Skills CD order form wasn't working properly, and NOT believing people, I finally found the problem.
I made a cardinal mistake in Web design - I didn't test my page in multiple browsers. I personally use Firefox, so when I designed the order form, I tested it in Firefox, and it worked perfectly.
Orders started coming in no problem, but a few people here and there started complaining that the form wasn't accepting their credit card number for the $1 shipping fee. I tested it. It worked fine for me. I even had a couple of people give me their credit card numbers, and they worked fine for me (in Firefox).
Well, after getting the ump-teenth complaint this evening about it not working, I decided to finally test the page in Internet Explorer.
Guess what... bug found. For some reason, a piece of Javascript code that works perfectly in Firefox just decides it doesn't want to work in IE. So, I got rid of it completely and am just using an ASP script on the back-end to do the same thing (verify that the CC number is valid).
Why am I posting this here? Well, a few reasons... first, to admit my guilt. I am a veteran programmer and web designer and even *I* goof from time to time. I should have tested this page in Firefox and IE before deploying it. So let this be a lesson to all of you (my students) who build web sites.
Second, of course, I want to let everyone know that if you've tried to get the free Job Skills CD in the past few days, it's not you... it was me. Bad web design.
Sorry everyone! It's fixed now.
17 years ago
