As you may or may not know (or care), Diysearch is based in Boston (well, Central Square Cambridge to be percise) and because of that I’ve been looking around for other like-minded web projects and people and came across Boston DIY.
Not a typical “list your show” type of site, a bit more care and quality goes into this site, “there are enough places to find those show listings. ”
In addition to good quality listings and posts, there is a message board, all with a local angle. Very interesting and nice to see an active DIY ethic here (hey, I’m still new to this place!)
Yeah I know no one is actually following this, and at this point this is just more of my scratch pad so I don’t forget… call it a public sticky note.
Going to make another minor tweak to the “report link” feature. Right now its currently set to only allow logged-in users to report. Well, I don’t want that to be a hard-and-fast rule, so what I’m going to do is make that configurable, where I’ll be able to switch it off or on at will (instead of actually changing the display template logic). That way I can open it up to annonymous users, but if it gets out of hand (again) I can just flip a “switch” in a config file to turn it off (and only allow logged-in users). Its not the best solution, and I’d really be open to suggestions, but this is what I’m going to try.
Had to make a minor change to the link reporting functionality. Found out pretty quickly that anonymous users started abusing it (or, hopefully, just misunderstanding it) so I’ve blocked its use to users not signed into the system.
The “report dead link” function is there, you just have to have an account and logged in to use it.
That’s the current change. The upcoming change is to extend the functionality to change “report dead link” to “report link” and then offer options of the type of report (i.e. dead link, mis-categorization, aup violation etc.) This will help us (myself and Sol, our editor) when reviewing link reports (right now there are so many, its difficult to keep up — this is not a complaint, its good to have actively engaged users trying to help… this is a GOOD thing).
Also… an update. The all-in-one login for everything is coming along. I don’t have an estimation of when it will be deployed, but I am making good progress.
I’ve been getting some (good) feedback on a real problem. There are two blogs, and the main site, (as well as DiyShare coming along) all of which have a separate user database. Yeah, I know this isn’t good. I’m fully aware of the real pain that’s involved with something like this. This is not a new problem and not unique to this project. Any project that has multiple web properties built on desparate systems runs into this eventually.
I do have a solution. All wordpress installations will start sharing the master user database that Diysearch.com uses. The solution comes in the form of a wordpress plug-in. Wordpress has provided a way to overload most of the user functions (authenticating, fetching). I have never written a wordpress plug-in before but it looks pretty straight forward, and since I am (very) well versed in PHP, it won’t be an enormous undertaking. What it will take is time.
This frustrates me. I would rather spend time working on more interesting problems (like DiyShare) but I have to take time away from that (important) effort to work on this, in that this is a priority (systems that are in production and are behaving in sub-optimal conditions get the priority). This problem is mostly a nuts-and-bolts problem, in that I have to overload about a half-dozen functions in wordpress with functionality I wrote for Diysearch (the user authentication and management functions). Again, thankfully I was smart when I designed Diysearch, so each piece of functionality is wrapped in a class that can be invoked from anywhere.
The nagging difficulty will be deciphering wordpress’s code to figure out how to make the user objects. This is not documented (I shouldn’t be surprised, open source projects always are lacking here, well that and security, but I digress). So, I’m going to have to figure out what variables/keys to add so that permissions, and other user attributes get set properly in the wordpress system, with data coming from the Diysearch user database.
See? I told you, not terribly interesting, but it is important.
As I’ve said earlier, we have an editor. This is a very good thing, in that she is going to be making sure things run better around here, and that reviews are done in a timely manner, that content is of the highest quality we can achieve and, especially, that new ideas are presented (she has been remarkably productive in this regard).
Pay attention to her blog, in that she’ll be spelling out more what the site is, where its going and how it will be shaped in the future.
I also did a code push tonight to fix up a few things, improved some of the admin tools and added a few details to the link details screen. So, it was a very productive night.
