Cluster 2.0 Now Available
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!