It's crunch time at work so I've neglected to give a website update recently. Here are some things you may have missed if you haven't visited recently...

'Sharing' is now called 'Views'. It's hard to get the 'Share' concept across in thirty words or less. It's a personalized view of a website.

The entire comment interface was revamped to allow for comments on multiple object types. Instead of just weblog and forum articles, you may now also post comments on photos and profiles.

Profile viewing has improved, adding some more community features. It's also been linked with the buddylist stuff.

A lot of this stuff was here already in more obscure forms - I've just exposed it a bit more.  

Improved the name generators. The basic name generator will also do a website lookup and see if the domain is available. I've also added some options so you can lookup names by length - in case you're trying to find a catchy domain name that's less than 8 characters. Good luck... but the tool will show some interesting candidates. I've also added the same suite of options to the stage name generator, which additionally can use a predefined first or last name.

The name generators by default will not show adult terms. You can change your profile tolerance to add these to the mix. The profile tolerance may also be adjusted to include racier random quotes on the page footer.

Profiles have started to take on a bit of a 'myspace' appearance, though it's questionable how far down this path I'm willing to take it.  They will use your view/(share) theme and avatars so you can tailor the look a bit. I've also added article and comment counts in a few places so you can see at a glance who is a contributor (all three or four of them) and who ain't.

Oh, and I'll mention the music player also. I've got a bit more work before you can upload your own playlist, but that will be coming shortly. I've populated a few cool web radio channels for your listening pleasure.  

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.  

Since I'm working full time again, I've had to come up with ways of reducing the daily maintenance load of this and all my other websites. It turns out that dealing with wave after wave of comment spam is the most time-consuming chore. Since this is a moderated website, none of it ever gets through. But somebody (like me) has to look at each message that gets past the kiddie script filters and then the floodgate analyzer (the first lines of defense) and click to discard it. I'm sick of it.

This is all so the site can allow anonymous comments, but that isn't what the site is all about - and it's a very disproportionate maintenance task for such a low priority feature that gets used maybe three times a year legitimately and about sixty thousand times a year by spammers. So effective immediately, anonymous comments are gone. Site members can still comment on articles. It is only those that come from nowhere and belong to nobody (and are addressed to nobody and say nothing) that are being restricted. 

The avatar selector library was brought into the modern age last week. This is all part of the re-organization of image collections, since this is nothing more than a special case image collection. Once the special cases are dealt with, I'll start to migrate the rest of the photo albums. Anybody creating an album today will be dealing completely with the new interface - the old one is only there to serve up old pages.  Your photo albums can now have guest comments. Well, if you read the last paragraph, more appropriately would be 'member comments'. Eventually you'll be able to do anything with a picture that you can do with an article.

The ability to create newfeeds is now rate limited because of some unpleasant experiences I had working with a sister site to this one.  Anybody can have a couple of personal feeds. If you want more, you need to get more points (by being a useful and contributing member of the community).

I think it's interesting to observe how much 'software development' is actual technical engineering vs. how much of it is 'social engineering', implementing rules and policies, weeding out anti-social elements, rewarding 'good behaviour', etc. As time goes on I'm doing a lot less of the former and a lot more of the latter.

It's been a while since I updated the changelog. Here goes...

Added several general purpose reference tools to the 'tools' menu. Besides the world's most comprehensive chord chart and the conversion tables, you've now got a calculator and dictionary/thesaurus, etc. The dictionary is coming to you from dict.org. I tried to put a good dictionary online here, but the space requirements turned out to be phenomenal.

Added uploaded avatars to the list of things which could be censored. This hopefully will keep me out of legal trouble if somebody tries to upload a kiddie porn avatar. Registration forms now require an age. This is yet another legal compliance issue. Not sure that the law has taken effect yet, but if it does, I will need to know members' ages retroactively. You can still register invisible if you don't want anybody knowing your age (or anything else about you).

Added a few pages to send links and registration stuff to friends. Added email notification that you've got mail here; because otherwise you might not know to check it.

I changed a few hundred other little things as well, but they're escaping me at the moment.