CUBEsMIND

Well I haven't been working much on my site, because I've been putting my free time into building a web programming for work and trying to startup a D&D campaign with some friends.

So just haven't had enough time on my hands to finish the Edit button and try to fix the Spellcheck. Which doing either one of those would essentially be enough to temporarily handle the problems of the other one.

On the plus side, the site for work has got me thinking about general website infrastructure, so that should help me overall. It's nice to work on something that may actually be used by other people as well as help me at my current day job. It just kind of pushes me to keep at it, instead of getting into my normal rut of "why am I doing this? no one cares? I'm the only one that's going to see this? etc.".

These are issues I've always been trying to work out of my psyche, but it's not the easiest thing fix by one's self.

After noticing that I tend to do several posts at in one day, then no posts for the rest of the week. I wanted to setup a system that would fix this imbalance in content.

I've added in a post-date system. So that setting a future date on a post will hold that post until it is the appropriate date to show it. Hopefully this will allow more consistency in my content.

Working a bit slow today, so I just ran my site through a SEO analyzer to get an idea of where I currently stand with that. Not too bad so far. I did notice that the favicon wasn't up to snuff, so decided to mess around with that a bit.

Apparently I had to add some more "options" to cover all the different and magical devices out there now a days. I think I have everything in there now. Had to put in a couple of different sizes, some XML, and add some header links in.

I know the regular viewer of the site won't see what the New Post form looks like, so I put a before and after picture of how I cleaned up the form view.

Changed the topics and the rating from radio buttons to dropdowns. Was trying to figure out if I could put the New Topic field into the dropdown, but have yet to figure out how or if this is possible. I'll look into it again later.

The date field now keeps the format shown in the input box's placeholder and I moved the current date into the append part of the field. Although I won't forget how I format dates, I like to see it displayed and even though the current date is as hard to find as looking at the corner of my screen I like just having it sit to the side. I kind of want to add one of those dropdown calendars, but just seems like a little more research than I feel like doing at the moment.

I finally took the time to put in TinyMCE and the plugin to insert images. This adds a bunch of convience when typing up posts, giving me the ability to easily format without the need to insert html tags.

This will also make things like paragraph seperation easier, instead of just dumping a large block of text into the user's lap.

I haven't used the image plugin before, so I may need to tweak it a bit. Reading through the documentation it appears that some more features can be activated with it, allowing me to edit images. As for now I can just insert them, which is well enough because that will help me with adding reviews and ratings.

Was looking at my notes and remembered I wanted to put a rating system in for posts that have to do with reviewing various things. At first it was just going to be for movies and shows, but figured I can rate other things too. Well I say other things, but mostly the other thing would probably just be food and drink products. I'm going to go with a 5 star system, because I always liked Netflix's original rating system. Basically 1 is hate it and 5 is love it.

Just had to add in a breakpoint and a pull option on the post headings to get it to layout the way wanted on small screens. The edit button is going to be a little tricky but I think I came up with an easy way to handle it. Still want to implement tinymce, so I can format the posts. Need to see if that will also implement a way to add images, if not I have a simple idea for that...I think it's simple...yeah should be fine.

Took some time today to finish up the new post code. So now I can just add posts using the interface instead of doing a direct database entry. Much more convenient and will allow me to add posts from my phone while I'm out and about. Also added an input option to create new topics with the post. I like this option better instead of creating a whole new dialog to do this. Just have to do the edit/update code and that should be the main bulk of what I need for the site at this point.

I just sat down and hooked up login panel real quick. So now when the form is submitted it checks the submission against the database to verify if the user is valid or not. Now I just have to add in visibility options for valid users. I'll try to do that tomorrow, but not sure if I'll be up to it so may just do it on the weekend...kind of want to hammer out the new and edit posts abilities this weekend too.

Started to add in the login forms and controllers. Kind of going a bit slow, mostly because I've built logins and such before and it's just a little tedious. Kind of been a bit blah these past couple of weeks. Luckily I just pushed myself today and started to work on it, so now the progress should pickup.

Was going to setup the Date menu to be expandable but decided to just set it up in years for now. So changed the name from Dates to Years and have it display those accordingly. Just felt like a much simpler fix for right now. I implemented the Topic Menu too, so posts can be filtered out using either Years or Topics now. As an extra I also added the active class to the menu item that had been clicked on. So if someone clicks to filter and goes back to the menu, they will see what they had clicked as a reminder that the posts are being filtered. Later I'm going to add that active class to the Topic and Year title of the menu so they won't have to use the dropdown to see it. That will just mean I need to move some of the HTML into the function, so didn't want to mess around with that now, because I'm hoping to implement the create new and edit post functionality tonight...since I've been putting that off for so long.