Burnout and Future Plans
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.