Finally got some rudimentary Ajax stuff working; luckily I won't need to use much of this technology on the site, but it's important to make the rating of sentences as easy and fun as possible, which means it's got to be pretty and not have to have people hang around while the page refreshes. After a valiant battle with technology, including a very irritating and difficult-to-track-down bug which turned out to be a problem with MySQL rather than my code, I've finally got the basics of an Ajax-based rating system. Now all I've got to do is make it a bit more elegant and a bit more secure and it'll be good enough to go.

At which point, the site might well be good enough to go live for alpha testing. Maybe I should make one of those violator badges with "ALPHA" on it... :)

Just added (not yet fully-tested) support for time zones; this should allow users to set their local time zone on their Profile page. After that, all sentence timestamps will be displayed in their local time. This is useful for me right from the beginning, as the site is now hosted by GoDaddy in Arizona, and I'm here in Bristol on British Summer Time, so the dates weren't even looking right for me, let alone international users...

Anyway. Next piece of work will probably be the "Rate This Sentence" system. That'll take a little while, because it'll involve some thinking about the design, rather than just ploughing on with things.

This week I got some hosting space with GoDaddy, who provide PHP-capable server space and MySQL databases, which is all I need for uniquesentence.com. I've got a test version up on the web now. There was a bit of awkwardness here and there, mostly with PHP configuration (things like magic_quotes settings, and the fact I rely on output buffering, which wasn't turned on by default. Still, it didn't take too long to sort out, and now everything that was working at home is working on the web.

Today I added a "view all sentences" page, and added first & last names to the user information, and fixed a few things. It's all going pretty well.

Next steps are a sentence ratings system, a sentence of the day page, (maybe) a search facility, and a bit of a tidy up of the screens which don't need to be in the main menu.

This is the first uniquesentence.com blog post. This is a pre-pre-pre-alpha version of the site, and it's not even on uniquesentence.com yet; it's just being hosted on my Mac....