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 :)

I'm now back from Lincolnshire, and waiting for me when I got home was this week's episode of the splendid Sowerby and Luff podcast, where this site got a nice long plug! I was awarded a Sowerby and Luff "Bachelor of Bollocks" when this site won "Pointless Website of the Week". I can't think of a higher accolade :)

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 :)

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...

Okay, so I've managed to grab a few hours from my excessively busy week, and tidied up the website code in preparation for the first release! I've made the layout simpler, and I've taken a fair few chunks of common, repeated code and put them into functions and modules. I've figured out how to handle some awkward links, and I've got Virtual Domains set up under apache on my machine so I can test it as if it's properly on the web...

There's a Bank Holiday coming up this weekend, so as long as I don't spend too long in art galleries or just sitting in the sunshine, I should manage to get the alpha release on the web by Monday! Then I'll tell a few people about it, and we'll see what feedback we get. Oooh, that reminds me, I should have a feedback address set up...