The FearlessBlogging.com Blog

Fix some bugs, add some features.

Features: every post now has its own RSS feed for comments. Sometime in the next few days I’ll be adding a feature to the site that lets you preview posts / comments before committing to them.

Bug-fixes:

* Don’t show disabled comments (whoops!)

* Sidebar borders were being shown all funny in IE, and only in IE. Is that really a surprise, though?

* Post rankings weren’t be updated properly. Well, they are now.

Feature requests? Drop them here or shoot off an email found on fearlessblogging.com/site/about

Just recently improved the site’s sidebar: you can now view recent posts OR recent discussions. It’s also more aesthetically pleasing as well.

I’ve noticed people were commenting on week old posts, and then the conversations died off as those posts rolled off the last 10 list. To rectify that now we’ve got the last 10 comments available.

Next up is an RSS feed for each comments section, and then… well, something else that’s interesting, I hope.

Took longer than expected, but the new site is up and rocking.

You’ll notice I removed individual comment tagging — nobody was using it, and it was kind of complicated any way.

Comments, questions, etc: see comment page in action, or leave me something here.

In the next week or two the new face of the site will go live.

It will be less ugly (thank god) and more pretty (thank god!) and hopefully be more useful, as well.

Stay tuned.

Oh, if you want to see anything in particular (and this goes out to the 4 people subscribed to the RSS feed) just let me know.

Taking a cute from too many Japanese animes, posts are now ranked as A++, B+, C, or D-.

The links to rate a post are on the bottom — presumably so people only vote AFTER they’ve read the post.

Posts should be rated on whether you’d recommend others to read them or not.

…yes, I’m really quite awful at web design in general. The backend stuff is cake, but I’ve always been hung up by developing graphically pleasing user interfaces.

Ive you’ve got any suggestions for the site, feel free to drop me a line and let me know what a horrible experience you had and how I can fix it.

Features that will be coming in the next week or 2 (hopefully):

• Entry rating: 1-5 stars based on how interesting an article is.
• Post tagging
  • Preferably an auto-generated tag cloud based on the content of the post — people abuse the hell out of YouTube’s tagging feature, trying to avoid that here.
• Autosaving posts.
• A few minor improvements to enhance the usefulness of the site.

Features that are still up in the air

• Trackbacks.
  • They seem useful for some occasions - but they can also be easily abused. Will have to put more thought into it.

Feel free to suggest more features by mailing me or responding to this post.

This is what’s called a “soft launch” I think — wouldn’t know, since I don’t do this for a living or anything, but I’ve seen the phrase mentioned on Techcrunch a couple of times.

FearlessBlogging.com is still work in progress even as I write, but it feels good to have the site up and exposed to the Internets in general. The site is empty as I write this, but that will probably change in a few days as my peers find out about the site and immediately start abusing it.

For the tech-heads out there wondering, this is yet another wonderful Ruby on Rails website.