dreadedmonkeygod . net

I did a bit of coding yesterday. Not a lot of it will be visible to you, but it laid the groundwork for some really cool stuff.

You can now put paragraphs into comments. A blank line is now interpreted as a paragraph break. The code at the moment is a bit brittle: I'm just using a quick regexp to do this, and I'm sure we'll see problems with character encoding, extra spaces, etc. For now, just be careful to hit "Enter" twice in a row when you want a paragraph break.

Eventually, maybe, I'll incorporate a Markdown engine into the comments system, but not today.

If you check the little box that says "remember me" when you submit a comment, your user info (name, email, and URL) will be stored in a cookie and recalled next time you enter a comment. Nothing is stored here at DMG, and you can clear it any time you want by going into your browser's cookie settings.

And I can now do some very basic user configuration via an admin page. (Site admin to follow.) Big woop.

And finally, the "next" and "previous" links at the bottom of individual entry pages now render correctly. (They used to be all wonky, and sometimes get cut off.) I just realized that they're not consistent with the "continued" link on some entries, so I'll have to fix that. But basically they're fixed.

So that's the scoop. I'm basically moving to a position where I can start playing with AJAX, with two specific goals in mind:

Form validation. I want to be able to write rules in Java, so that the Struts ActionForm classes can use them for validation on the back end, and they can be rendered by custom tags as JavaScript validation on the client. That validation will signal problems to the user before they submit the form, and do so in a more user-friendly way than your usual scheme. Ideally, errors would appear as comic-book-style word baloons pointing to the problem field, and disappear as each problem is fixed.

Site administration. Uploading picture/file attachments, creating/editing blog entries, site configuration, etc. I'm doubtful that much of this will make it to user-visible areas of the site, but it'll be good to expand my own experience.

And, in case you're wondering: I'm intentionally building a lot of this myself. I've found that just using other people's code is kind of like using a calculator too soon: instead of learning the concepts, you just learn to use the calculator. Over and over again, putting in the work to build something myself has paid enormous dividends when I did finally pick up a fully-polished third party framework. (And it's paid bigger dividends in helping me recognize when a third-party framework isn't ready for prime time.)