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...

The truly excellent xkcd webcomic has an IRC channel, and on that channel, unique sentences have just been enforced! This is an awesome development (literally; the technical development is the ROBOT9000 bot that enforces uniqueness across all time.)

This is a blow for originality (I'm sure that's been said before, but I figure I can get away with tired clichés for a little while, at least until Randall figures out a way of running the thing across the whole damn' web...) and I just wish I'd developed Unique Sentence a bit more in the last little while. If I had, I'd feel a bit more able to chime in and say, "so, when you come up with some of the unique sentences that ROBOT9000 will encourage, how about posting them over here for posterity?" As it is, this is still effectively a friends-and-family site that I fiddle with when I want to learn a bit more PHP/CSS/(X)HTML/design/whatever.

Ah well. I'm just happy that the UQ (Uniquosity Quotient) of the universe just got a little higher.

Tags: admiration, xkcd

I use Nozbe to help me out with getting things done. It occurred to me that (a) if you're on this site, you're probably doing it because there's something that you should be doing but aren't, and (b) Nozbe have an affiliate program. So, Nozbe has now bumped the Google ads on all my pages down a notch, as I think Nozbe will be far more relevant to all you slackers...

Seriously. Look at me: before I read Getting Things Done by Dave Allen, and then used tools like Nozbe (and the equally excellent, though lacking an affiliate program Neptune), I just daydreamed about creating websites while I put things off by picking fluff out of my belly button, or oiling my staplers. Then I saw the light, and now here I am, Curator of Unique Sentences on this vibrant site.

You know it makes sense.

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 :)

Right. Let's hope that this version of the website is stable and happy for a week or so, because I'm off on holiday, and I don't know if I'll have internet access while I"m away. With good luck and a following wind, everything will chug along happily for a while without me.

Any sentences which are marked as needing approval may have to wait for a week before showing up, so apologies in advance to anyone affected. Sentences get marked as needing approval for a variety of reasons, some automatic, some random, some provided by an external spam-detection service, so please don't be offended if your sentences get caught. Especially if you happen to be talking very uniquely about viagra :)

When I get back, there may be lots or little that's changed about the site. It probably depends on how much it rains in Lincolnshire over the next week :)