Sometimes I get overwhelmed with the number of new features that we want to build or are in development. I think the nature of tackling “big projects” always leads to this sort of stress. We’re redoing the easybib backend, and whichever way you cut it, it is a big undertaking, and no real way to avoid it.
That said, every so often I get to tweak a little detail on the site that goes a long way in terms of making the site more functional. Today is one such day.
On our helpdesk, we kept hearing people tell us they’ve already emailed us before, even though on our end we never saw the email.
We double and triple checked our email system and everything seemed to be in working order. But then we started manually testing the email process ourselves, and we realized that if an invalid email address was entered (as in, not in the name@address.com format) it would just not send the email.
So I coded up a quick validation script and if an invalid email address is entered, we send the email through anyway. Now, it’s still not ideal because we can’t reach the customer, but at least we’re aware of issues and can tell the customer to input a valid email address.
And of course, our script could be better – it could be client side, so a form isn’t even submitted, but this was a quick tweak that hopefully will let us respond to our customers faster and more comprehensively.
We need to implement Kaizen. 🙂
EasyBib 