Ooops! Kavey pointed out that the site was broken for sentence submissions, and after about half an hour of swearing at MySQL, it turned out that it was actually a problem with a spam-checking module I was using. I've dropped a more recent version in, and everything seems to be working fine now, so life -- and the submission of sentences -- should be good again :)

I finally saw one too many stray backslash in confirmation emails -- if you submit a sentence with an apostrophe to the site ("Oh my God, it's full of giraffes!") then the email confirmation the submitter gets _and_ the email copy I get would be sent with apostrophes escaped ready to go into the database ("Oh my God, it\'s full of giraffes!".) This cosmetic bug has annoyed me slightly for about a year, and I only just got around to fixing it. Ugh. But anyway, from now on you shouldn't see any more ugly extraneous backslashes in Unique Sentence emails.

I'm now using FeedBurner for the Unique Sentences RSS feed, and I've corrected a couple of minor issues with my RSS (thanks, feedvalidator.org!)

Tags: rss

I've just added an RSS feed for new sentences, so you can now subscribe to new Unique Sentences in your favourite feed reader. Thanks to webWICKED for the handy tutorial. Links to the feed are available in the sidebar of every Unique Sentence page except this one (I didn't want to confuse people by having an RSS feed for the blog and an RSS feed for the sentences on the same page...)

Tags: rss

I've just added Auntie Kavey to the Credits section on the "About Us" page, for her sterling service as a usability tester :) I've now got "make the CAPTCHA more obvious on the heckle page" on my to-do list!

At long last, I've sat down for an afternoon (and an evening, truth be told) and implemented a discussion feature -- which I've called "heckling" -- for the site.

It's basic. Logged-in users can add a comment to any sentence, and all the comments from all the users are shown in order after the sentence on the page. And that's about it. There's no threading, no email notification, just the absolute bare bones of a system. But it's a start, and we'll see how it evolves from here.

At the moment, spam protection is being provided by the very worthy reCAPTCHA project. That may change, though. If I get too many bottom-feeding spammy morons attacking the site, I'll just go for manual approval of everything that's submitted...

Bearing in mind I've been meaning to do this for months and months, it's nice to have finally got around to it. Hurrah! I'm going to go and have a self-congratulatory coffee.

I've just added an administration facility that I've been meaning to put on the site for a long time: I can now trim the worst sentences from the site. I've just gotten rid of the bottom 20% of sentences based on rating. The system avoids binning sentences that have only recently been submitted, so it should give everything a chance to be rated one way or the other before it wields its mighty scythe.

This afternoon and evening, now I've warmed back up on my PHP and MySQL coding, I'm going to make a start on my long-threatened sentence-discussion system. I'm aiming to have a basic system up and running by the end of the week, but don't hold your breath for email notification or threading...

Okay. I have two main personal goals for June. One is to enter the Bridport Prize short story competition, and the other is to implement discussion forums on Unique Sentence so that people can comment on (okay, maybe I mean "argue about" :) each sentence. It's likely that the forums will take second priority, as the Bridport has a hard deadline of 30 June. But I'm still going to try to do both, as they're quite complementary in terms of brain requirements, and working on either one should help me give my brain some time off from the other...

A friend just sent me a link to One Sentence (thanks Alex!), which is not entirely dissimilar to Unique Sentence, except that their sentences tell a story. I guess the other difference is that theirs are crafted, rather than cropping up accidentally. Anyway. It's a fine site, and I commend you to go look at it. I'll be trying to think of a One Sentence story for them myself :)

In other news, I'll soon be putting some form of terms & conditions in place for signup to Unique Sentence, which means that all the sentences will end up Creative Commons licensed (it's been on my "to do" list for some time, but seeing One Sentence's terms and conditions reminded me.)

I'm also thinking about tidying up some of the sentences. Some of them are just plain lame (thanks, AR. You know who you are) and some of them are a bit on the poorly-formatted side. I may well correct spelling and capitalisation, at the very least... Think I'll include that in the Terms & Conditions; I've always wanted to say "...and the editor's decision is final" at the end of a sentence :)

Okay, the basic version of the search facility is now written and live.

The search should be fairly robust; there's only a few of things that still really need sorting out:

1) The word search is just a brain-dead wildcard substring match. It could be much better.
2) Needs a "sort by" facility. But there's not many sentences in the database yet, and I need to have some time off this evening, so that can wait!
3) Non-Javascript clients won't be able to rate sentences which appear in the search results. I just need to nick the handling of that from
the Browse Sentences page, but I think I should be starting to break that kind of stuff out into a function.

Still, it's basically working, and looks okay, I think.

Right. The search facility's about halfway to a basic working version, but I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and go get some sleep! More tomorrow, hopefully.

I've been tidying up and doing a few structural changes on the site; there shouldn't be much apparent change (although the Submit A Sentence page should now look right in Internet Explorer, as well as not crashing Safari if you tab past the "submit" button.)

Anyway. Coming next is the much-requested feature of a Search page. This will let you do things like see all of a particular person's sentences, order a search by date/rating, see all the sentences you've not yet rated, and so on... Hopefully I'll be getting started on that tomorrow, although I've also got a novel to write and some exercise to do :)

I've just added a "Circumstances" feature so people can record the circumstances/context of any sentence they submit (e.g. "Old man on No. 17 bus", "after dropping a tin of artichokes", etc.) It's a bit rough and ready at the moment, but it works, and I managed to do it while having a coffee at the Watershed on my way home from work :)

Okay, so all the pages are validated, and I've got the ratings working both with and without Javascript, so we degrade pretty gracefully if we can't do the Ajax stuff. I think we're ready to go. So, I hereby declare the Unique Sentence website well and truly open for (alpha) business!

Things coming soon are:

• 
  
• A search facility
• 
  
• The ability to submit some context information, i.e. how did the sentence come up in conversation, etc.
• 
  
• Maybe a discussion forum for the sentences (each sentence would have its own forum)
• 
  

But that'll be after the first round of bugfixing and responses to feedback from alpha testing...

Well, I still have to do two last things before this is really ready, which is to let people without Javascript enabled to edit sentences, and then to validate all the pages (check for links, and, more importantly, validate the XHTML/CSS, most likely using validator.w3.org...)

I think that at some point in the next few hours, I'm ready to go alpha. I'll release the site straight onto http://www.uniquesentence.com, but won't tell anyone about it except a select few testers. Then we'll see what happens.

I'll then take a break from it, leaving it a week or so, to let the whole thing settle in my mind and figure out what needs doing next (well, apart from the search page, which just plain Needs Doing, I think, for architectural as well as user-friendliness reasons.) Plus I just need some time off thinking about this thing; learning (from scratch) enough of XHTML, MySQL, PHP and Ajax to build a website in a few weeks has been a bit tiring...

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....