Got OpenID more or less working on a few of these websites. Macgirvin.com and cr.unchy.com for starters. I'll extend this to other sites as I shake any remaining bugs out. 

The biggest hurdles have been in handling profile data which isn't always available via OpenID. I'm hoping there isn't a big rash of spam since this bypasses our email verification. Just have to wait and see. I don't mind self-signed identities, but they have to resolve to real identities, or they ultimately aren't worth the paper they aren't written on. 

And hardly anybody supplies their birthday in the OpenID world. I don't care so much about the birthday as the age, since this is turning into a legal requirement for social sites; and also relates specifically to the laws (i.e. the DMCA) regarding storage of personal info for youngsters.

I'll have to code around these until these issues make it into OpenID proper. They will. You can't really have a distributed identity service that doesn't map to an identity or that doesn't play along with federal law.   My own company is working on something in this space but of course I can't talk about that. 

Oh yeah - please report any bugs you encounter to the bugs forum. 

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.

I'm dramatically changing the way that photos are stored and accessed on this site. You shouldn't see/notice much difference, but this is a heads up just in case you do. Until I get all the old photos migrated, both systems will live side-by-side - and you might see that some photos have different URL structures than others.

A side effect of these changes is that profile photos (i.e. avatars) are no longer restricted to 100x100 pixels or less. They can now be up to 150 pixels, but it doesn't matter because that just happens to be the size that we scale all of the photo thumbnail images to. So you can upload any picture (within reason) and we'll just use the thumbnail for your profile.

How much space you can use for photos is dependant on how many points you've got. All members start off with enough space to upload a few pictures. If you want more -  you have to earn it.  

The other day I started on an 'Events' page to provide reminders of birthdays and important events and stuff. I figure it would be a very useful addition to the site. I'll have a demo online perhaps in a few days, as time permits.

It's somewhat ironic that I got so occupied putting together the framework for the birthday reminder project that I neglected to remember my father's birthday that day. 

The theme for the latest batch of changes is 'online presence'. 

Online presence added - this is a little AJAX app to let you see who is online at any given time. I don't currently have a method to implement "I'm away", but it does remove you from being actively online after about half an hour of inactivity (I'll be tweaking this in the future to more accurately reflect what's going on). You will fall off the list if you leave the website or logout. 

I'm also adding 'guests' to the online presence instead of just registered members. I solved a lingering problem about how to identify guests individually instead of having 27 people showing up under the name 'guest'. The reason this is important is because solving it allows guests to enter the chat room (which is yet another AJAX app).

Oh yeah - the chat rooms... Now that I've been digging into some of the more esoteric ways of querying the database, I also solved another nagging issue, which is how to tell how many people there are in a given chatroom at any given time.

So now perhaps the chat rooms will get some use, perhaps not. We'll see... 

--

Next on the todo list for upcoming feature enhancements is going to be a way to share  and possibly merge your subscription lists. This way you can easily configure your view of the website to contain (for example) all of the music related stuff, plus your own weblog, and everything that your best friend has subscribed to. This is light-years beyond anything you'll find at social sites like 'myspace' and might be more accurately described as 'ourspace'. That's the plan anyway. The devil is in the details. And as you may know already from watching this site evolve (at least for those of you who have watched the site evolve),  you're likely to discover some even more interesting ways of using this ability which haven't even been thought of yet.

Feeds: Cleaned up the atom feeds and added support for feed-thread, which is now Proposed Standard. 

News aggregator: Added voting and censorship to public feeds. 'My Sources' is now truly private, so you can get a daily feed from Hustler magazine if you want and not worry about somebody censoring it. It's your feed - nobody else can see it. 

Rate My Photo: I got bored looking at the same top two or three pictures flip back and forth on the front page over the last couple of weeks. Now everybody has a chance at the front page. You can also vote on the picture you see on the front page by clicking on it.

Security: More XSS madness. Third party attacks, image execution, high-bit filtering in ASCII mode, that kind of thing. 

Account: Cleaned up the account page a bit, and let you specify a weblog photo just like an avatar.

Weblogs: Weblogs now have a theme selector, so you can pretty much personalize them without any HTML/CSS. Maybe it's time for a theme contest... 

Apologies to our regular visitors - I've been tweaking the menus a bit. There's now an 'action' menu for each article which will collect all the various things you can do when presented with an article. This list was growing a bit and getting out of hand - so I put it into a dynamic menu instead of littering the article with even more links and meta information.

This is a bit of an experiment, so let me know what you think. If it turns out to be an unwise choice I'll flip it back.

I'm now storing the original article URL with the article. This could get a bit confusing, so for now I'll call it another experimental feature as well. You see, some folks are viewing this page from 'macgirvin.com', some from 'baddcafe.com', and some from 'sonicamusica.com' - and a whole bunch of others. Shortly I'll be adding an article action which will allow you to view an article in its original context. That is, if somebody writes a guitar article on sonicamusica.com - but you're viewing the page from floozee.com, you'll be able to link to and view the page on the original site and see the environment in which the article was created.  You would probably call this an advanced feature, and I don't expect it to get a lot of use. It could turn out useful someday if any individual website starts getting an abnormal increase in usage. This way I can spin it off on its own without disrupting any other emerging communities.

It will also be possible to link to and share with entirely different communities. I'll leave that for another day. 

I already mentioned the censor and tolerance features in the comments to the last changelog. 

Photo albums now have dates on them. The photo page is now sorted a) by number of votes, and then b) by reverse creation date. This puts new and/or popular stuff on page 1 instead of the oldest stuff first.

Since the avatar collections are shared amongst 'regular' and 'adult' websites, I've moved the adult oriented avatars to a separate collection with a tag to indicate that they are adult oriented. The site you are viewing this message on isn't configured as an adult site, which is a long way of saying that the inappropriate images have vanished from here. 

All the teeny little cartoon avatars have been removed. I'm trying to standardize on 100x100 avatars. If you had an avatar in one of these other collections, I mapped it to the closest match I could find in the 'large' collection. If my choice isn't right for you, feel free to change it - or you can always upload your own avatar.

Added the top rated photo to the front page. Also removed some of the forum/weblog stuff (Top Articles, Recent Comments, Recent articles, Categories, etc.) from the menubar when you're not looking at articles. This is a performance issue - so that we're not wasting time looking up articles (which you obviously aren't looking at) every time you vote on a photorater page.

Check to see if new comments have been added since your last login - and 'open' the 'Recent Comments' menu if that's the case. 

If a certain number of people rates an image as offensive it won't be shown, but the site admin(s) can reset the counter and also block images completely - this is to reduce mischief. The exception is the top rated photo on the front page -  since this has higher visibility, offensive ratings have a more immediate impact.

Image uploads - now preserves the last used server folder name so you can upload to the same folder repeatedly instead of being required to change the folder name each time.

Weblog URL's now have 'weblog' added to the path (i.e. sitename/weblog/mike instead of just sitename/mike). I mentioned this change was necessary several months ago but finally got around to doing it.  This was to prevent a naming conflict if somebody chose something like 'forums' or 'tags' as a username; since these are already used as system paths and could have made their weblog inaccessible. The old paths will still work - provided they don't conflict with system paths. If that's the case the system path will win.

There will likely be a few more bug fixes and useability enhancements, but this concludes the development phase of version 3.0. 

URL field added to comments.

Some more large avatars.

Added previous and next image viewing in photo albums to save going back and forth to the index.

Behaviour modification on the side menu. Previously menu blocks would be made visible if you clicked on them, and made invisible if you clicked them again. (The default state of some of the items is invisible to avoid cluttering the page.)

- Now the menu block will unconditionally open if you mouse over it, and only toggle state if you click on it. This is all because auto-discovery of the dynamic menus was pretty low. Visitors just thought there weren't any recent comments, forum categories, whatever.     

Investigations into Atom-thread support. It's not too difficult, probably about an hour of work. But I'll wait for it to be blessed by the internet council of elders. I'm a bit critical of the implementation, but I've been around this game long enough to know that you don't always get a clean spec. The most you can ask for is something that's technically capable of doing the things you need it to do, and that you don't have to re-arrange your entire data structure in order to implement. 

Added a very basic private messaging capability. I mean besides the anonymous email gateway, which I had already - and the adult version of private messaging; which I don't have enabled on this particular site. I think I'll turn off the anonymous email gateway since I was mostly using that as a fill-in until I created a private messaging capability.

But be warned - this is not yet a feature-rich messaging system. Right now it just consists of the pure basics. Send a message, view messages. I've got a lot more work to do on it. 

Latest modifications:

Atom 1.0 feeds added.

Forum level 'Recent comments' added (previously this was only available on weblogs)

Photo albums released.

Photo collections will be automatically unpacked if uploaded in either 'tar' or 'zip' formats. This is ignored if any member files contain relocated or absolute path components. 

New theme - 'darklord'

Added action icons on user/member page - detail view and adult interaction (if configured with $ALLOW_SEX) 

Feeds now contain the entire message payload within the respective body element. This includes comments, comment avatars, comment links, and attachments. I was dissapointed how many external aggregators fail to handle attachments consistently (or at all), and very few use the 'comment' RSS element (at all). This allows an accurate content mirror using standard feeds.  

Forum table implemented. (Previously forums were article attributes.) This allows forums to have descriptions and  permission structures, although more work needs to be done before forum permissions are turned on.

Help page for compose is back after a lengthy absence.

Security: Uploaded PHP files are converted to .txt

Fixed a couple of typos (main page and 'members') that slipped in which rendered correctly but gave the w3c validator some grief.