One of my major projects this year was helping update the Aurora Awards website (the Aurora’s are Canada’s SF/F fan-voted awards). I’d like to say it was because I am SOOOOO selfless, but really, I won an Aurora last year and I wanted the website to present a professional appearance (something that looked like it was from geocities doesn’t really give the award much clout) plus a lot of people were frustrated with the nomination/voting application.
I’m not going to talk about the main website — I still think it needs a fair amount of work…and truthfully I’m not a designer. I much prefer to develop and implement systems. So I overhauled the nomination system. That was a biggie. Why? Well, I didn’t know PHP (a scripting language) so I had to teach myself that. And I wasn’t familiar with MySQL (a database) so I had to teach myself that too. Then there are always added wrinkles — things like ‘oh, we need this finished in two weeks’.
Anyway, I think I’ve made an improvement on last year’s model. Not only is it pretty straightforward, but it tracks IPs so no more stuffing the ballot box. That’s right — we can tell if you are registering yourself, and ten other people, from the same computer.
Now I didn’t have time to implement all the changes I wanted (and am not comfortable changing them midstream). First instance, it’s a one-shot deal right now. You have to begin, and finish, all your nominations in one go. I much preferred so you could’ve saved your progress if you needed more time.
You can check it out here (and vote if you are so inclined): http://www.prixaurorawards.ca/Membership/
I have nothing eligible this year (though I will next!). I’ll present my picks shortly.