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... :)