Electric Squirrel

So I’ve given some thought to the WebMUCK Project and I’ve decided to put it on the back burner. It’s more complicated than I had anticipated, and it’s not going to be done for a while. I need to pump out some good, short projects for my portfolio, so I’m going to do what most of my class did back in school and write a simple blog. Well, I’ll do it a bit fancier than they did. I’m going to use all my HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, AJAX, PHP and MySQL skills. Well, as many of them as I can squeeze in there at least.

Now I’m going to do a rough inventory of what I’ll need to create to do this.

Viewing Page
Post/Edit Page

Just three pages. Lots of scripts though.

The Viewing Page will need to access a PHP Script that will show blog entries. It’ll need to be able to tell which entries it’s showing, so that it can show pages of ten entries at a time. There’ll also be a login box for the blog owner to log in and make and edit posts. That means it’ll also need to keep persistant login data.

The post/edit page will be simple by comparison. All it has to do is send form data to a PHP script that will push the data into the database. In the case of editing, it’ll first load a post, but that shouldn’t be much more complex.

I’ll try to keep to the MVC format, so there’ll be a controller_Blog.php script that the pages make RESTful calls to, and a model_Blog.php script that models the database and permits interaction with it.

I think I’ll start by making the basic HTML of the pages, then plan out the functions and methods for the scripts and how they interact, before implementing them. I find it helps to have something to look at to put everything in perspective.

—–

Alright, the HTML and CSS for the basic index page are done. I’ll have to edit them once I start actually programming, but this gives me something to start with. Next I’ll do up a form for posting/editing entries.

—–

And that’s a nice little post page. I think that’s enough for one update. I’ll share the github repo later.

So despite life’s penchant for getting in the way, I’ve been continuing to work on the MyFirstChatroom prototype. So far I’ve made most of the controller and database and started on the view.

So far it’s just two text areas and a post button that runs an empty click handler. Before I do the click handler though I want to do the function that gets the chat from the server, and before I do that I want to make sure I can set up an event timer. I thought there was one in JQuery but I can’t find it, so I’m going to try JavaScript.

—–

I actually folded up my laptop and left my work overnight, so the following is the next day’s work. I was easily able to find a JavaScript timing function that works wonderfully with JQuery; that’s probably why they don’t have their own. I’m working on the AJAX for getting the chat entries now.

I’ve got the most basic infrastructure down, but today’s just not flowing right so I’m going to take a break and maybe work more at home later. I think I may want to work out the interactions between the controller and view ahead of time next.

I’ve been on medication for only four days but it feels like so long. I wouldn’t have guessed it was that short if I hadn’t just looked at my project changelog. The last entry was the 4th. I’m feeling somewhat better and so I’m able to go off of the mind-bending pain killers and just use the standard kind.

My next task is to complete the Create() function in the model_Chatroom class that’ll create new chat entries and delete the oldest after the buffer fills. The function will return true if it works, false if not.

It’s been a while since I used PHP MySQL querries so I’ll need to refresh my memory. *refresh*

*work work work*

And there we go. It deletes the oldest entry by timestamp if there are over 200 entries using the most arcane MySQL command I’ve ever used. Short and effective though, and safe as far as I can tell. Very good.

I’ve added an empty UpdateViews function, to interface with the views later when they’re added. Basically, it’ll have to tell everybody when something is updated, or they’ll have to constantly ask, one or the other.

It occurs to me at this point that I’m building a completely annonymous chatboard. Well, I suppose that’s to be expected without adding an account system. I might do that for a second version before starting the WebMuck proper. There won’t be any security or admins either, just a bunch of text blocks listed by timestamp. Oh god, I’m making 4chan aren’t I?

Next time, I work on the controller.

If anybody out there is curious why updates suddenly stopped, well, I got sick in a bad way. Infected tooth, extreme pain, I’ve been heavily medicated for like a week now. I’ll be doing more work once I’m better.