Journal entries in 'Miscellaneous' for April, 2005

And so BinRock acquires yet another useless feature. I've added revision tracking; now when I edit a post, it remembers the changes, and you can now view the changes made between any two revisions of an entry. Of course, it's pretty uninteresting for now because there is only one revision available for all the posts made until now.

So the question is, what good is this? I don't know. Nobody cares about seeing what mistakes I've corrected. It's another of those features I add just because I like the idea of it, and want to see if I can do it, regardless of its usefulness. The next improvement should be a little more worthwhile though. I'm going to fix all the form processing scripts so that if you don't enter all the required fields, it will save your input and warn you nicely, rather than yelling at you for your stupidity and throwing away what you typed just to add insult to injury.

There's some 14-year-old girl named Katie who lives in Pompano Beach, FL and really really wants to know what my favortie band is. And apparently she thinks my tastes change often, because she asks me again every few months. I'm seldom here, so often she just gets my away message, but this doesn't deter her. Really, her persistence is touching. I'm glad knowledge of my current musical taste is so desperately desired.

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I finally got around to implementing the feature in the photo gallery software where you can click the left half of a photo to go to the one before it, or the right half to go to the one after. If you have JavaScript enabled, it should also underline the corresponding links above and below the photo to give you a bit more visual feedback about the new behavior.

Also, if you don't feel like moving your hands to the mouse, there are now two ways to navigate with the keyboard. Details inside.

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My old roommate Todd will be joining us on BinRock soon. I've only seen a few of his photos, but they were really good, so it'll be great to have him on here. BinRock seems to be becoming a little photography community all on its own. I didn't plan it that way, but I'm happy that's the direction it seems to be going. I wonder if it'd be worth modifying the photo gallery software to function more as a community photo gallery with multiple interacting users, à la deviantArt, rather than a series of disparate galleries that all happen to look alike because they share a common backbone. Perhaps people prefer to keep their sites "belonging" to themselves. I can see how deviantArt users wouldn't really call their DA member page "their" website, and I imagine BinRock's users might not want to give that up for the community metaphor. Besides, if someone wants to be a member of a photo sharing community, there's already sites like DA and Flickr with much larger communities. There's no need to duplicate them. Still, I like the idea of having more interaction and a community feeling. Perhaps there's some middle ground.