December 13, 2019

So it's been longer than I'd have liked between updates since real life has caught up, but I'm still working on this intermittently. Post connections are now functional at a basic level, so I can probably say that this site is now fundamentally operational.

The two major things now are implementing a hover-to-view on post connections and implementing an auto-update. I'm sort of dreading these since I think they'll both require some major code rewriting, but both are probably really necessary to get the UE up to snuff. Once these are done I'll feel more comfortable fixing up the non-functional things, like adding the logo and tinkering with some visuals and making this dev log look nicer.

Also, I've set up the site email to be just [my_alias]@[this_site].org. Very exciting!

-Amphy

July 6, 2019

Happy one month, lads. Posting is now operational and more or less bug-free, as far as I know. We're now basically a shitty glorified IRC that you have to constantly refresh, but I think that's enough for me to finally be able to give a genuine to-do list going forward:

High priority:

-Get post connections working and make navigating them as intuitive as possible. This will probably have to include some sort of hover-to-view function.

Mid priority:

-Figure out how to trim posts. I figure it'll be based on either time or a maximum number of posts, with direct connections being treated as a bump, but it's hard to tell what would be optimal with no activity.
-Let users have different ways of sorting posts. Right now they're sorted by new like a chat feed; I'm thinking of adding sorting by number of connections and also only picking out posts with no initial connections. Maybe more options if I come up with some.
-Add the "About" and "Rules" pages, and clean up this dev log so it looks a little nicer.
-Tidy up some of the little markup issues.
-Add the site logo and maybe a banner image.

Low priority:

-Make the post box draggable.
-Display site statistics somewhere.
-Let images be attached to posts.
-A bit of a pipe dream, but at some point I'd like to have some sort of non-linear visual that shows all the posts and connections like a graph.

Hopefully I haven't missed anything. My conceptualization is that "high priority" is just what's needed to complete functionality and "mid priority" is what's needed before I'd consider the site publishable. Wouldn't it be great if I ever seriously got to "low priority."

-Amphy

June 17, 2019

So there's more or less what I imagine the site looking like. Not spectacularly original, I guess, but whatever. It suits my needs. There's still a few bits to be added or tweaked, but I think all the necessary functional pieces are here.

Next step then would be to actually make the "Post" button functional. That entails having the user actually be able to type up and submit a response, having that response appear in preview on the left, and then being able to click it to see it in full on the right.

"Left-post" and "Right-post" are really awful terms to use, by the way. Not catchy at all. They're just the labels I gave in the HTML.

-Amphy

June 12, 2019

Welcome to Noder!

This is up to now my most ambitious and also my first web development project, so "snail's pace" will probably be an understatement. Really it'll be an absolute miracle if this ever turns into anything even approaching usable, so don't hold your breath.

For completeness's sake, this domain name and server space were purchased June 6, and this site went online June 11 in the sense that the domain address returned anything other than an error message. There's so much to do it'd be almost pointless to give a dev to-do list right now, but I guess the next big step would be to throw some CSS around and draft the static site layout.

For now, you can contact me via amphynoder@******mail.com, where ****** is two ups and a down.

-Amphy, site administrator