Today was a day of touch-ups and minor feature implementation, as well as some minor load testing, optimisations and clean-ups. What follows is a short change-log, of which the accuracy isn't entirely guarenteed.
- Added Search Capabilities -- it's availible as a menu option, or on the index page. Recommended you only use one or the other (index or search) in the menus, since they are quite similar.
- Added Hit Counting -- Hits to the main page are now logged to a hit counter, which can optionally be displayed on the bottom of the page, but is always shown on the admin page.
- Added Good Logging -- made a log file which is quite extendable, and scripts can dump things in there as they so choose. So far, it's only logging hits to the main page with timestamp and ip; however, it's only four lines of code to add logging elsewhere.
- Added a log viewer/flusher to the admin page. Straight-forward and uncomplicated.
- Added a half-decent links page. It even supports catagorisation, and entries/catagories are sorted alphabetically. The admin page to go with it is fully functional, and not even too awkward.
- Moved the encryption key used to store passwords into a definition at the top of each script in anticipation of an install script for the blog, which could be run at the shell... of course I haven't made this script yet, but I'm thinking ahead to it anyway.
- Added a bunch of menu entries for sections that I haven't completed yet. Currently they return a dummy page with a non-generic error 404ish message. Mostly, they're there to remind me to code them :P
- Fixed a few things in the admin section. One can now choose blog entries to Modify/Remove with greater ease - and hitting logout takes you back to your own main-page.
- Added a 'Misc Options' section to the Site-Admin page allowing one to set whatever weird options that need to be set on a global basis. Currently it only sets SMTP server and admin email. SMTP server will be used for feedback/email forms later so that I can completely hide email addresses from those that would be harvesting them for spam purposes.
- Cleaned up the side/top menu rendering a bit, put them in a forced sort-order that makes sense -- custom links are now at the end, and they are grouped and separated logically.
- Fixed one syntax error that was causing some grief (W3C's code validator turned it up...). All of the admin pages generally look cleaner now.
- Added some error correction at places that I could cause errors by entering obscure information (like slashes, spaces, ampersands, etc...) This is far from complete at the moment and certain places are still capable of producing an error if an unfamiliar character or somesuch is entered... Can't use semi-colons on the link page entries for example... although I can likes just convert entered URLs into unicode -- %something substituted for the semi-colon.
Procrastinating on the Projects page -- it'll likely be the most difficult all around. I also think that if I finished the projects page, my motivation for continuing the development of this code would suddenly disappear, as my ultimate goal (as described in my first entry (that's the first time I've linked to another entry within and entry (these brackets are getting recursively more annoying)))
In the meantime, I've been pondering just how to handle the guestbook and comments, they would be quite similar. Most likely, I'll just keep the comments flat, not threaded -- too hard to implement right off the hop -- however, I'll leave hooks to make it threaded at a later date if I determine that I actually want threading...
Also, the 'reviews' section is an idea I came up with today... but I'm thinking of extending that idea and having it broken up into sections and sub-sections: IE: Articles->Editorials, Reviews, Reports->(each of those catagories would also branch). Then, provided my code is sound, I may be able to turn this into a commercial entity for aspiring columnists could post anything they'd like.
Also, added the menu entry (currently a dead link) for an images section. Am thinking of allowing a content gallery so that artists could post works for public consumption. I don't want to get into music/video galleries as well, since they chew up bandwidth/storage space too badly. The top of the images page would contain a copyright disclaimer (I'll have a default disclaimer, of which blog-masters could modify to suit their specific needs) followed by auto-generated thumbnails beside which the author could attach a comment. Clicking thumbnail would provide full size version.
The about me section will likely be one of the next to go live, after I implement my form based email capabilities...
Other ideas have surfaced (and I've discarded some, like voting forms -- some mistakes EZ-board made that I don't want to repeat.) regarding capabilities that I'd like to implement... some on the admin side, some for the projects section (which is scaring me in it's potential scope -- I don't want to rewrite sourceforge!)
Perhaps I throw this code on a bytebenders computer and use it as a split profit stream... Have people pay an annual fee to be a member -- for some reason though, I don't like that... It would be like having to pay to access a BBS, which I refused to do. Speaking of which, this is seeming to feel more and more like a BBS the further I progress... perhaps my fond experiences with BBS software of old are subconciously affecting my design desicions... In fact, this is probably my biggest programming endeavour since the BBS days.
Alas, enough for tonight, time to sleep now. Be Safe.
Modified: 2003 02/28 02:01
Modified: 2003 02/28 15:59
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