Blogs

Mock Up 1 #announcement fstdt.com blog

Alright, have the basic mockup together. Now that I have it I'm not entirely sure why I thought I needed pictures, anyway here goes.

When you enter public admin you would be presented with a listing of quotes as shown below:
image
For every quote currently displayed within your public admin filters you'll have one of those.

Mostly what is shown on any given quote page today in a slightly crapper format, excepting the currently suggested tags and the Admin Panel. Well, the format will definitely be better when I spend more than 20 seconds on it, but the black boxes should give any aspiring designers an idea of my general div layout. More partitions can be added as needed, but that's my basics. The suggested tags do a quick show of any tags that have already been selected for the quote and when complete the admin panel will have one of those nice "I'm expandable push me" arrows in it's left corner.

When you push said not-yet-existent arrow the panel for the current quote will expand and display the following:
image
Giving all the current Admin details for the quote and supplying a method to enter any of information you need to enter.

Issues cover any general observations of a quote, be it corrections that need to be made, or reactions to the quote to explain your vote. In this case we have one person having had a slight overload and noted such. Any text entered into the issue will be saved when the admin changes are submitted, and will be displayed to anyone who examines the quote after that.

Our new big feature, Tags are the next major section. All tags are followed by their current vote count, any tag with a vote count of 1 or higher is selected automatically. If you wish to add a new tag all you need to do is select it, as I have with 'Scary' in honor of the guy in the comments of this quote who seems to think it involves a dead waitress, when the admin changes are submitted it will increase the tag's count from 0 to 1. The remaining tags would increment from 1 to 2. If you disagree with an existing tag, unselecting it will cause you to vote against that tag being included. If a tag is at 0 already, leaving it unchecked won't push it down any farther.

The last section is the quote approval selections, with effectively the same three options we have now along with tracking on how many time each has been given thus far. Approve, Reject(I like it more than Delete) and Abstain. Hitting the Submit Admin Changes button will pass this selection and any other admin panel data to the system through an asynchronous call. What this means is you get a little spinning wheel only on the one quote and can still play with the rest of the quotes you have displayed on the page and the quote will be completely removed from your public admin access. Once the call completes you will receive a notice that your changes have been submitted, and there shouldn't be any conflicts if multiple submissions are made in a short time frame.


What this gives us is the ability to look at all the quotes available, let people ignore certain quotes and continue out of order, not cause anyone to miss quotes if they check into public admin regularly and in the case of duplicates select the best one rather than the first one.

The potential problems would be voting 'irregularities' which I have a real simple plan to get around. Rather than incrementing the vote when a public admin vote is pressed, the entire vote will be recalculated using the most negative vote on record for all voters. Even if someone breaks the system their vote will still only count once.

The undecided mostly consist of the 'Public Admin Filters' I hinted at up above. Right now my plans for those would be having a day by day selection for public admin quotes. You pick a day and you have all of the quotes submitted that day are presented to you. But I'm open to more ideas on that, particularly any that would be useful for identifying duplicated quotes.

New Month, New blog #announcement fstdt.com blog

It's June 1st and the blog's getting a bit of a make over.

It is now publicly accessible, has it's own image and has a new name, Distind Says the Darndest Things. The image is a laughing Father Jack that happened to strike my fancy. If you're reading this and don't know who that is, find a way to watch the linked show. We'll see how the blog being public goes, but so long as the signal to noise ratio stays reasonable it'll stay that way.

If you've been following along already you'll know I owe everyone a mock up of a new public admin interface, but right now I owe myself some freaking sleep that illness has ensured I didn't get. There's an outline together but a visual representation will be better for showing the points I want feedback on.

Mucking about with Tags #announcement fstdt.com blog

I've been kicking around a public admin design I'm going to post at least one mock up of this weekend, and in doing so I think I have a good start. I also realized I have a few core tags I know I want to have.

Funny, Stupid and Scary.

These three tags could go a long way in picking out quotes you'd rather see at the moment and if a quote is submitted and doesn't hit one of these three we know off the bat to dismiss it.

Beyond that I've been going back and forth with the idea of making the archives themselves tag based. Having Fundie, Conspiracy and Racist tags and rather than doing some separate archive plus tag setup, the site would be able to generate an archive for any given tag. Perhaps even combinations of them(this'd be more of a pain in the ass). On the upside this would allow for multi-category posts to be tagged as such clearly, on the down side it would mean they'd show up multiple archives and I'm not sure how well having the same quote in multiple places would go over.

Things to ponder while I try and figure out how I got a cold in May.

Cone of Shame #announcement fstdt.com blog

Having done my serious review of the code, I'm going to bump the full reworking of the site up rather than trying to get a handful more features added into what already exists. The code works, but that's about the extent of it, aside from search which I've completely re-written and some of the core quote retrieval code there's little to salvage in what I have.

But, the bits of good news:
*User accounts won't be removed, I have control over the data and can port accounts to whatever I need to.
*I'm going to do some improvements to general lay out, but I will keep the relatively simple layout because it works on damn near anything. Just some rounding or nicer menus. Maybe even a "Change your archive" selection that's actually visible.
*Friendlier URLS will be a thing, and I'll do my damnedest to continue to support core existing URLs. I don't see any reason I can't keep them as of now.
*The crux of my implementation is going to be tags, particularly in seeing if I can get them to work along with some of the key technology improvements I've been eyeing.

There are a few other smaller bits that I'm looking at working in based on people's suggestions, and I intend to have at least a high level specification for what I'll be producing for public consumption and critique before I start getting into the heavy lifting. But the core of this is, unless it's a bug fix it'll come along with the new version. I'll take reports of bugs and deal with them as they come up, but I've been fighting the urge to make myself a cone of shame as I looked over what I'm working with after four years of professional development, so it's not getting any more work done for it.

Public Admin #announcement fstdt.com blog

[Admin Note 6/1/2014: Public Admin requests are currently closed, will be opened in a new post later.]

Public Admin for those not aware is the process used to approve quotes for the main page.

In theory the system can be self sustaining, members vote their way through the quotes in queue, 15 up votes and it goes live, 5 down and it's dropped from the queue. Right now I have just under 10 active members in public admin and I'm following the queue at about a week delay to allow members time to vote on quotes and note any issues they find to do final approvals since there aren't enough to get an approval through on just member votes.

Which brings me to two points,

Leaving them up for a week ensures that the members get a chance to see them, but leaves topical quotes seven days removed from being news. I'm considering shortening that, but I know we don't get a whole lot of votes on a few days of the week, so the most I might narrow it down to would be two days.

I'm looking for more members interested in joining public admin. Right now if you can see this post you're signed up with an account, if you express interest in the comments I'll do some checking up on your site activity and most likely bump you up to public admin status. I'm not going to demand quotas, but a few minutes a day can go a long way in streamlining the process, particularly if you pick up on issues for me to correct before the quote goes live.

Tags #announcement fstdt.com blog

Number one request right now is tags, which has been for quite some time. Which has the slight problem of directly conflicting with how the archive displays work right now. All of the displays on the site take advantage of ASP.NET databinding, which most simply translates as one row of data is one row on the display. When a page of the archive is called up the site goes and gets a set of quotes as rows in a table, each row is one displayed quote consisting of a number of set fields that always exist.

With tags I don't have a set number of fields. I have however many tags as I need to apply to the quote. Which is rather simple to track in the database, but the current display mechanism simply doesn't support it. There are a number of methods I could use to attempt and integrate into the existing display mechanism but it would violate the only worthwhile principle built into the code to do so and create more problems in doing any further modifications later.

That said, in the last four years I've dealt with this kind of problem a number of times elsewhere and have some reasonably solid solutions that could function, if I completely re-write the core mechanisms of the site. At which point I may as well overhaul the entire thing, keeping the handful of things that really do work well and drag the site into some semblance of modern interface design while I'm at it.

Which is pretty much what I plan to do as I snag a few more books on subjects I'm less familiar with than core applications development. Over the next few weeks I'm going to start working out exactly what I can implement in a reasonable time frame and what I can't and lob out questions on just what people are interested in seeing but for today I'm going to start with the details of what people want to see from tags.

Should tags be relatively simple, relating to any aspect of a quote, or should we have sets of tags relevant to who's being quoted and what the quote is about? Beyond that, just what set of tags would be sufficient to cover the quotes as we have them? I've watched what happens with open tag creation, and the merging and hacking of tags that goes on, so I'd much rather have a defined set of them to select from. But too large a set and they're difficult to use, too small a set and they don't cover much.

What are people's opinions on tag handling? What tags would you want to see?

Wildcards and Equals Signs #announcement fstdt.com blog

Search has been overhauled, and it may or may not be noticeable.

The two big notable changes.
First, search no longer assumes the page will persist on the initial search, which means the page doesn't load the results, it kicks you to a new page that does, and if you back up to that page it will always have the first page of results available. Thanks to Goomy pls for pointing out the issue.
Second, you can now filter by archive if you wish.

The backend has been completely replaced, actually split into two pieces so that the majority of cases can run a simpler request which should run faster than the old system. Bit of an adventure getting everything to work, but everything you enter will go in to further refine your search. That said, adding to this would be dead simple compared to the old setup, if anyone has requests they'd like to see for search let me know.

Getting myself a new desk and playing carpenter today, but I will get some details on tags up by mid week. Specifically why they're a pain in the ass, and where I could use community help.

Oldies #announcement fstdt.com blog

I have a few features I said were coming ages ago which I want to see if anyone still cares about. If you have any particular interest in the following vote the post up and if it's a single item on the list mention it in the comments:

* Quote Submission Tracking
** See what your Quote status is
** Possibly get notifications through email of approval
* Submitted quote management
** Manage submitter display
** Claim quote submitted under your email
* Marking Favorites
** Creating your own personal archive

None of these would tie up Tag implementation any longer than it's already going to be. Which I'll start running through the details of next week once I finish off the reworking of the search function this weekend.

Intro #announcement fstdt.com blog

Welcome observant members and URL hackers, Distind here. This is the FSTDT dev blog entitled Distind is a Lazy Bastard.

I've been tooling around the site's code again and finally implemented a few of the things the site's needed for the last four years. We now have an Account Recovery system linked off the login page and if there aren't any quotes for the archive you're viewing the page will actually tell you that. (Edit: I found the damn edit bug! delayed release a day but I fixed the stinking thing) Also did some tidying around the archive mechanics while I was setting up DIALB. I have a few more items on my to do list before particularly long and I actually have time to get them done.

That brings me to the reason for this bloggy thingy. I'm a lazy bastard. It's right in the name. If left to my own devices I wind up doing work that doesn't even merit a note on the update page, I want to stop doing that. I want to know what people would want to see out of FSTDT. So from time to time I'm going to post thoughts, updates or what have you in here and see reactions. Further, if anyone has something they damn well want to see, say something. Pretty much anything short of more Archives is fair game, including major reworks of the FSTDT interface.

I may bring up a few other uses for DIALB should I get a particularly amusing legal threat, or find any interesting and unloved quotes in the archives, but right now it's all about making the site better.

For now this bloggy bit will act like any other archive, so if you want to head back to the other quotes hit the main page and select your archive, but any feed back is better than the odd legal threat I get over the admin mail now.

2008 fundies #fundie #announcement fstdt.com blog

The 2008 Fundies voting

1) Fundie of the Year for 2008
A) David J. Stewart
B) ><>Karatemum<><
C) Garvan Ellison
D) HeartBrokenBrad
E) Raani Starnes
F) Jayden's Mommy

2) Life Time Achivement award for 2008, Fundie followed by achivement title
A) Troy "Ultimate(over 9000) Spam Troll"
B) SuperSport "Excellence in pursuit of ignorance"
C) BigChrisFilm "I Ain't Breaking No Rules"

3) Fundiest Board for 2008
A) Rapture Ready
B) Gaia Online

Voting's all over folks, but I'll open up the comments

Distind

And the results are in!
Fundie of the Year for 2008: David J Stewart
Life Time Achivement award for 2008: SuperSport "Excellence in pursuit of ignorance"
Fundiest Board for 2008: RaptureReady

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