June 2008
1 post
Search Form and Some UI
Chapbook now has a proper search form which you can drop down from the top menu. it also introduces a *gasp* new color. I also spruced up the Favorites page just a tiny bit, as it was very, very rudimentary. The next target is chapbook organization and then the river, and then I will try to get some beta people to opine on the functionality and usefulness.
I must also not get too distracted by...
May 2008
5 posts
Rails Issue w/ Highlight and Excerpt TextHelper...
Here’s a weekend Rails discovery that I meant to post about yesterday. I was working on the search support in Chapbook using Ferret and was referencing the Acts_as_Ferret Tutorial from Rails Envy. I jumped down to section on Highlighting because I wanted to introduce highlighting in to the result set for ease of use. Here’s what I read: The requirement to do this, however, is that...
Comments Feed
Phew, long time. Busy at work. The poem pages now parse out the Disqus comments feed and set it up for auto-discovery in the browser. So, you now have easier access to subscribe to comments on any poem.
OpenID Improvements
Okay, one quick refactoring later. The site is now based on OpenID rather than locked-in accounts. So, you use an OpenID, you get logged in, a blank account is created for you and you must add a name before proceeding. That’s pretty much the deal. The login page now has some guidance on OpenID for anyone not familiar. You can also add a backup OpenID (or 20). I will have those...
OpenID Support
I’ve added in OpenID support. You can now create an account/login using OpenID and/or Clickpass. There are, however, some oddities. Clickpass doesn’t appear to provide nickname or email when it authenticates a user so if you login by OpenID you can’t use an existing account. Long term, this won’t be a problem because my plan is to move to purely OpenID-based...
RSS for Search
You can now perform a keyword search using the URL format http://poetry.heroku.com/search/waterfall and subscribe to the feed from the result set (or be optimistic and add .rss after the terms to get the feed straight away). Hoping to get some time this evening to build a search form.
April 2008
12 posts
Revisions RSS and Search
RSS for revisions and search are now working (miracle occurred?). I need to build a search form, but for now the syntax is http://poetry.heroku.com/search/[terms] with the usual ferret OR and other modifiers being applicable.
FOAF Added (why?)
Thanks to CrowdVine Blog » Blog Archive » Implementing FOAF in Rails, I was able to easily implement Friend of a Friend (FOAF - an RDF spec for semantic web stuff) quite easily on Chapbook. So, now your profile is more semantical.
Most RSS Now Working
With the exception of user’s activity log (aka, “the river”), revisions to poems and comments on poems, all RSS is now operational. I’ll try to polish the rest off this weekend. Disqus has an RSS link for comments on poems, but I’m in the process of figuring out how to make it auto-discoverable. The rest just requires me to write more code. The river may have to...
A Poem About The Internet
kfan: Do not stop to think or edit You must be the first who said it. Nice.
RSS is Next
I think RSS will be next. I did some paper prototyping for work the last few days and need a break from UI stuff. I’ll try to get feeds up for poem revisions, chapbooks and see if Disqus facilitates comments as well (probably).
More Sky Pie
One of my other goals with Chapbook (aside from encouraging people to write more and better poetry) is to reward users by helping them find a publication outlet. This is a really under-refined thought, but in general I know that the process of finding and applying to publications is a bit onerous and probably could be done better on the Internet. I added that to the dev page. Meanwhile,...
Re-Design Progresses Reasonably
I’m happier with the layout. I’m only wondering now if I shouldn’t use a brigher shade of blue. I don’t know if I so much need more color as I just need the page to be less drab. The new size of the poem text is much better. I also ditched my custom comment code for Disqus integration. My own comment code wasn’t bad, but there’s more value in me spending...
Re-Design in Progress
I couldn’t hold out. I’m not adding more color, but I am adding more shading. I’m trying to make better use of screen space and improve the response to font scaling. I will also make the actual poem text much larger. So far, I’m happier with the layout than I was before. I need to paper out a few more existing screens, fix them, and then paper out the chapbook organize...
Re-Design Imminent?
Not sure what to do with it yet, but I’m not happy with the placeholder design. You might say, well, it’s a placeholder design. It bugs me nonetheless and the best way to get back to coding is to stop the design from bugging me. So, I think I might do some paper prototyping. Here are the principles that I’m going to try to work from: Text of a poem should be significantly more...
Chapbook - Write and Share Poetry →
Do you care about tag clouds?
I’ve been increasingly wondering if the tag cloud in Chapbook is at all relevant. Tags, certainly, because people should be able to classify poems according to user-generated schemes. But, are you really going to look at a pile of tags and go find poems to read based on those? Maybe. But, I’ve never used the Flickr tag cloud and I do fine. I mostly look at “top photos”...
Introduction: Chapbook is a web app I’m building in response to the shittiness of current Facebook poetry apps. Originally, it was going to be a Facebook app, but now I think it might be independent (with API for integration).
Anyway, the point is to build a site which let’s people revise, share and collect poetry. A good poetry site should make it easier to care about other...