Put Away the Wrenches
Cluster 2.0 is now RSS 2.0 compatible. Yay!
You may un-avert your eyes.
Cluster 2.0 is now RSS 2.0 compatible. Yay!
You may un-avert your eyes.
I am briefly adding RSS 2.0 support to Cluster 2.0, so don’t make this your first time to look at the app, please.
Well, it’s really late, but I had to stay up to finish it. Cluster 2.0 is finalized and now production-ready.
The back-end is 100% rewritten, and it now features much more advanced logic and management, in addition to a snazzy user interface. The perks to this will become apparent after the first node or two are added; right now many of these things are not available since there is no content.
The biggest comment regards the “filter” (parser) that the input text is run through when a submission is posted. This was completely ad hoc in Cluster 1.0, but now I am using Textile in Cluster 2.0.
The good thing is that you can probably type into the form just as you have before and not notice a big difference. However, if you want to bold things, etc., you also have the semantics available to you (asterisks, underscores, etc.).
I wanted to implement a Preview function in 2.0, but it’s not particularly feasible without using XMLHttpRequest and a good bit of non-compliant Javascript. So, I would encourage the use of Dean’s Textism site (as linked above and now available from the Links on the sidebar) as an ad hoc preview function, if you get too adventurous with the Textile markup.
Given the nature of Cluster, we probably won’t use any of these bells and whistles at all, but Textile is very good at chewing the proper amount of line breaks in documents to make things look good, and it normalizes quotation marks, etc. So, it seemed like a logical design choice for this round.
If there are problems, we’ll work through them, but I don’t envision anything significant. Also: the back-end storage mechanism is now broken into one-file-per-node, so it will be a lot easier to edit typos and translational errors if they occur.
(In Cluster 1.0, it was one-line-per-node within a monolithic file, and it was pretty nasty. There’s also a lot more opportunities for metadata now, although I’m only capturing timestamp at the moment.)
Oh: and you will also note that the “… starts a new paragraph” option is gone. This was due to a design issue with Textile and the fancy visual improvements in 2.0. So, make sure not to tick the “… ends the story” option out of habit unless you actually want to close the story for future posts.
Enjoy!
I’m six pages away (out of 28) from a rough-revised copy of Cluster 1.0. I’m in a midterm phase right now that will probably have to be addressed through the day on Monday, but I might be able to get something public by the end of the week.
Despite not working as hard today as I originally intended, I am somehow both burned out and ahead of schedule, as far as studying for midterms.
I am encouraged about Cluster 2.0. I already have an incremental wishlist brewing for a third version, which would probably have a “real” user management system (though I will never use persistent logins for Cluster), a commenting system, e-mail notifications, and the ability to make in situ editorial modifications. However, the backend created for 2.0 should be able to survive these modifications gracefully. That was certainly my intention.
What I would envision is an “annotated” view of the story on a separate page that would show the story broken up by nodes with essentially a blog in between the nodes. The main story page would indicate which nodes had annotations available, with a link to the annotated page. This would keep the main Cluster view “pure” of non-story elements, since readability is a pretty big deal for the application.
A few of these modifications depend on having the improved user system, so they’re on the back burner for now.
So, if you’re still asking, “When is he going to put up the rest of the site design?” it means my design isn’t good enough, because it’s done now.
I’m blowing up my page designs, so it could all be screwed soon.
Textpattern 4.0.4 is installed, and it is a bundle of delicious sweetness.
Kristin mixed up the new Ars Technica webpage design with a MySpace user page. That has to hurt.
I’ve taken Cluster down temporarily, but it will live on my hard drive, and it is backed up to my home server.