Monday 29 November 2010

Forum Emoticons

Any respectable forum needs emoticons, and FORJ shall be no different! I've based these on the 'Like' icon in Google Reader, because the style is a nice match with FORJ's default theme.

:) :( :D :'( :p ;) :$ :O :O

There's still a few more I need to do – 'angry' and 'rolls eyes', for example – but after that they're more or less done, until I think of some others I'm missing.

The forum also allows linking directly to posts, so here is the link to the emoticon forum post.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

FORJing ahead

The forum is coming along rather nicely now – I recently added the functionality to store each registered user's count of how many posts they've read in each thread, and soon I'll be able to implement thread list filtering based on this or other criteria (such as 'interest').

It's actually getting close to the point where I'd feel comfortable with saying the forum is ready for limited general use, so long as the users aren't expecting something as full-featured as vBulletin or Beehive. Still, the foundations are there, and the basic structure is more or less done, I just need to add furniture and stuff now. And maybe wallpaper.

Also, what it really needs more than anything is for a lot of people to test it out, poke it and see if it falls over. As much as I test it myself, there's bound to be some things I miss. If you sign up, you don't have to use a real (or even valid, I think) e-mail address – it's effectively just a username, and there's no mechanism in place to send anything to it. I'm not even sure yet how to do that if I wanted to.

Sidetrack

While the forum is taking up most of my coding time, I've also started working on another project, ostensibly for work but with the aim of making it generally available if it turns out to be useful beyond the circumstances in which it'll initially be used. In a nutshell, it's a non-realtime messaging application that's a sort of hybrid of e-mail and IM, for the purpose of basic information requests. The main selling point, and the reason you'd use it in preference to e-mail, is that it will make tracking and reporting on such requests much simpler, and easier to collaborate on.

So, not much to say about it yet, as I'm still working out the basics of how it's all going to work, and even what it's actually going to do, but once I have something worth showing, I'll talk about it here.

GitHub

If you're of a coding bent, these two projects are on my GitHub profile.