Tim
Life is good Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo

I've spent the last two weeks added a couple of new features. The largest new feature, CAPTCHA less comment submission!!! This reduces the barrier to entering a comment, and still allows for safe comment entry. But wait....how could no barrier allow for safe comments??? It all has to do with validating the comment of course!! Another biggie was paging on the tag pages. This is why it took two weeks! A little run down of other tweaks if you care to read on too.

So why did something so simple as paging the tag page take two weeks? In all honesty, I was over thinking the design and trying to put more work on the web tier for page processing when all along I should have just done it in the database. After all, it's not really that much data where it takes much time to do it in the database. So once I got out of my rut that was the web tier I was able to nail out paging in about 2 hours. Next on docket for paging: viewing a gallery! But get your helmets on, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

The improved comment system is great. It's already been hard at work detecting spam comments and stopping them at the door. Of course, just in case you leave a spam comment the author you're commenting to will receive a special comment to moderate. Any comment that is marked as spam will not be visible until it has been approved. This is one of the only settings that is not able to be over ridden by the site admin or the author, its mandatory!

Another really cool feature I added in is the ability to share a private gallery and images with non members! This idea came to me while at opening day for Westwood Little League. So now when you are viewing your private gallery you will see a special yellow box at the top of your screen with a custom link. Just copy and paste this link in its entirety and send it to anyone you like. This link will contain a special validation key that is unique to that gallery and allow unfettered access to the gallery. But why would you need this? Because not everyone want to show pictures of their kids (or any other private matter) to everyone on the internet! For instance, say you take a field trip and have pictures of all the kids in the class. Well rather than violating privacy and leaving the gallery unrestricted you can now share it to all the parents in the class, and they won't have to be site members to see it! This is a really cool feature and I will be using it without a doubt!

I fixed a weird cookie issue causing a "yellow screen of death" when a special cookie was not present. I've only seen this once, and hopefully this will take care of it.

So next on deck like I said is paging inside a gallery. It's gonna be pagetastic!! And in the hole is adding support for using markdown in comments and articles. Maybe even support in ALL text entry fields if I feel the need!