Update
I've just finished playing around with what people can see when they're not logged in. The 'permalinks', if I didn't explain them earlier, were an attempt to provide a place where a page with *always* be found, so that people coming from Google and other search engines would be able to find what made them click-through. This didn't really work out, I think mainly because the comments weren't shown on permalink pages, so search engines would treat them as duplicate content and not index them at all. In fact, initially, I did quite a bit of damage to our search rankings because I'm currently detecting user-agents of crawlers and serving a page without the sidebar. I was a little to harsh with what I culled, and I think the crawlers freaked, followed the link to the full content page, and then just indexed that anyway.
What I'm working up to saying is that you can see the comment without being logged in now (like the good ol' days) although it's not heavily advertised that an item has comments. This will increase the actual content of the site somewhere around two-fold, which is always good. I've also just done a bit of work with the sidebar login. It now remembers which page you logged in from and takes you back there once you're logged in. I seem to remember someone asking about this over a year ago, but I can't remember if I ever actually got it working - the source code shows no signs of me ever having done it, so I just don't know.
I've been working on so many sites recently that I've really learnt a lot about how I want to go about developing from now on. I've got a set of basic classes and functions that I take with me everywhere - this sometimes results in pages looking kinda similar, but it's so much easier to get them up and running and they're easy to customise from there. So, after using these lovely tools I've developed over the last months, going back to working with the SE source is just horrible! I'm looking into that rewrite - the bloat is getting pretty unbearable.
One site I'm working on at the moment, just as a personal thing, is something I've tentatively titled woo-mu. I'm sure you'll see where I'm aiming with this one once you view it. What you can't see, though, is how it's implemented in the backend. It's beautiful! Each of the 'console' commands is actually a vanilla php function. It even uses a reflection API to read the code comments (PHPDoc (JavaDoc) style docblocks) to decide if it should include a description of the command in the help listing. Translation: very, very pretty code. So, while it doesn't look like all that much at the moment, I'm thinking of enlisting Justin to do some writing for it to get it really functional.
Edit: Whoops! And of course, it makes use of the new OO stuff in PHP5, so it won't work on our servers. Damn. If you're lucky, you'll be able to catch me online, in which case it'll be here. In the meantime, I'll look around for a free host for it.
And that's all for now. Holidays next week (haha!) so will probably post a bit more then. I've got this idea for a post about an Ozma album - required now that I'm their number 3 fan on AudioScrobbler :-) Ooh. One more link: go!
I knew that the night had an end soon in sight
Until you called my name.
I knew all along I was right. But I'm wrong.
Somehow you knew my name.
What I'm working up to saying is that you can see the comment without being logged in now (like the good ol' days) although it's not heavily advertised that an item has comments. This will increase the actual content of the site somewhere around two-fold, which is always good. I've also just done a bit of work with the sidebar login. It now remembers which page you logged in from and takes you back there once you're logged in. I seem to remember someone asking about this over a year ago, but I can't remember if I ever actually got it working - the source code shows no signs of me ever having done it, so I just don't know.
I've been working on so many sites recently that I've really learnt a lot about how I want to go about developing from now on. I've got a set of basic classes and functions that I take with me everywhere - this sometimes results in pages looking kinda similar, but it's so much easier to get them up and running and they're easy to customise from there. So, after using these lovely tools I've developed over the last months, going back to working with the SE source is just horrible! I'm looking into that rewrite - the bloat is getting pretty unbearable.
One site I'm working on at the moment, just as a personal thing, is something I've tentatively titled woo-mu. I'm sure you'll see where I'm aiming with this one once you view it. What you can't see, though, is how it's implemented in the backend. It's beautiful! Each of the 'console' commands is actually a vanilla php function. It even uses a reflection API to read the code comments (PHPDoc (JavaDoc) style docblocks) to decide if it should include a description of the command in the help listing. Translation: very, very pretty code. So, while it doesn't look like all that much at the moment, I'm thinking of enlisting Justin to do some writing for it to get it really functional.
Edit: Whoops! And of course, it makes use of the new OO stuff in PHP5, so it won't work on our servers. Damn. If you're lucky, you'll be able to catch me online, in which case it'll be here. In the meantime, I'll look around for a free host for it.
And that's all for now. Holidays next week (haha!) so will probably post a bit more then. I've got this idea for a post about an Ozma album - required now that I'm their number 3 fan on AudioScrobbler :-) Ooh. One more link: go!
I knew that the night had an end soon in sight
Until you called my name.
I knew all along I was right. But I'm wrong.
Somehow you knew my name.