mosaik

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New Mozzy

posted by nd on Thursday, 29 November, 2007 at 20:27

Evening folks.  Here's an even-more-basic version of Mozzy, that will over the next few weeks become a verifiable ground-zero of new feature infestation.  But now that it's up (albeit in basic format) I need to go eat something.  Catch you later.

Update 30.11.2007: Just thought I'd post a bit more about what's coming up here.  If you look over to the right, you'll see a placeholder telling you that there are no upcoming events.  I've built an events system that works a lot like the posts system (largely because it's a copy/paste of the code), and any upcoming or recent events will display in the sidebar.  You will be able to go into an event and (assuming you're logged in) flag up whether you're coming, thinking of coming, or definitely not coming.  There's the standard comments system too for discussion.

I've built but not published an RSS system which each channel exposes, and a separate feed for events.  These again are built but not published, expect to see them this weekend.

On the subject of channels, the channels system is all built and working (the home page is actually just a skin on top of http://www.mosaik.org.uk/channels/1/), and members can add/edit channels as they see fit.  They can allow other members to post to those channels too.  If you go to write a post now, you'll see that alongside the standard save and preview buttons, you've got a publish option.  If you don't publish a post, it won't ever appear on mosaik, even though it's in the database.  In this scenario the post is a draft.

And then there's the image section, which is a bit less complete.  I'd like to have a gallery system where you can upload images, have them auto-resized, then when you're writing a post be able to insert the image into your prose through the UI.

I'm aware of all the bugs you're going to tell me about (the auto-save being a bit intrusive, edit/remove comments giving a 404, etc), but I'll get them fixed up in the next few days.  Finally, I will add a captcha and enable anonymous commenting in the next week or so.

Sage on Thursday, 29 November, 2007 at 21:09

Sneaky, but I noticed.  changing things up on us, huh? Has this version been coded drunk too?

nd on Thursday, 29 November, 2007 at 21:34

Bits of it - the bits that aren't published yet ;)

def on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 10:30

A nice tidy up, well done.  Your new server is skype supernode too...

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 17:45

Is it?

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 18:59

Great work code monkey! Many peanuts will be thrown your way tomorrow :P

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:11

A few observations -

1) It would be nice to be able to edit the about page.  Not sure how it's set up, is it another channel?
2) Profile pictures, how do we update them? Is it linked to images.mosaik.org.uk?
3) Would be nice to have obfusicated email fields in the profile. 
4) Sian says to change the "write a post", "update profile" bar thingy to be a different colour.
5) When we have images working, can we put a random image thing in the sidebar or something?
6) As discussed, maybe have bold, italic, link and other buttons for basic text editing for those of us less than html-savvy :)
7) RSS RSS RSS :P
8) Developers developers devel...  ok I'll shut up now.

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:11

9) Edit link for comments doesn't work for me.
10) Is Your Name field necessary if you're logged in?

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:24

In order:

1.  It's just a static page, there's no reason it couldn't be a channel in its own right, or at least a post, so you can edit it like any other post.  Good point.

2.  When the rest of the image gallery is done, it will be a bolt-on to that (shared upload code etc).

3.  Can do, maybe even opt-in/out per member, for the paranoid.  Yes, Sage, I'm talking to you ;)

4.  Feel free to make a mockup.

5.  Yep - good idea

6.  Yeah, good idea.  There's some basic formatting in place that I didn't bother telling anybody about.  I forget the exact ruleset but double-asterix around phrases makes them bold, double-underscores makes things underlined, double-slashes makes things italics.  Not as nice as a toolbar but marginally better than nothing.

7.  On it's way.

8.  I'm going to f**king kill Google!
Er, I mean, uhm...
[Throws chair]

9.  Did you even read the post? ;)

10.  No.  Will make that clearer by adding (optional) to the field title.

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:27

4) I'll get on it later and email you.
9) Ooops my bad.
10) Can you do a hide/expand thing with AJAX, if you see what I mean?

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:42

Also 11) Would be nice to have a "logged in as [username]" at the top when you're logged in :P

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:42

10.  Yes, but I think that's probably an expanding panel for the sake of it.  It's not a massive inconvenience to just scroll past the field, whereas it's more work to expand the panel, realise you don't need it, then carry on with your comment?

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:43

11.  Yeah, can do.  How about a greeting message under the tagline?

.david on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:44

10.  I like the expanding panel because it's less scrolling if you know what it is.  And you'll know what it is after one "expand" ;)

11.  Sounds good.

12.  I can't seem to publish a post at the moment, gives me an error.

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:46

You've just reminded me that a "while you were gone" section would be a nice idea.  You know, a landing page after logging in that lists new posts, or posts with new comments, new events perhaps.  Might not be necessary but it wouldn't hurt to try it and see.

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 19:49

I just published from your account, so I'm gonna guess it's related to the auto-save thing.  I'll disable it for now, since all it does is interrupt your typing flow and create lots of duplicate posts when you're authoring a new post (not so bad for editing existing posts).

Did you get a javascript alert about a server error when you hit the button?

nd on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 21:24

Yeah, some forums sort threads by most recent comment rather than post date.  It's more common on forums rather than blogs, where new posts take pride of place, but I could certainly play with an option to display that (again with the "what's happened" type view).

def on Friday, 30 November, 2007 at 21:55

Yeah all good, back to work monkeys!

Can we make it so we can add all our friends from uni, and perhaps a few members of supergrass...  Oh I forgot that be another site...  when do we get mosaik4facebook???

It's probably your SMTP server and a bad fingerprint on 25, but it comes up as a skype server.

nd on Saturday, 01 December, 2007 at 13:27

Granted it looks a bit similar to another site, but that wasn't intentional and I'm too lazy to change it.  And what're you fingerprinting port 25 with? The server greeting is simply "Got Mail?" so how that comes up as "Skype supernode" I have no idea...

def on Saturday, 01 December, 2007 at 14:56

It actually looks a lot like mosaik 2 as I recall.

Well fingerprinting is packet analysis to match up to known patterns, not connecting and looking at messages - the idea is to never make an actual connection so to speak.  It's easy for patterns to be similar or some kiddy to have submitted dodgy fingerprints.

nd on Sunday, 02 December, 2007 at 17:26

Ah, passive scans.  What did you use to profile the server?

def on Thursday, 06 December, 2007 at 18:58

nmap

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