It's been a long time coming..  A feature that has been requested many times that I remember...  The ability to attach many photos to an item.. a "PhotoSet".

First came the ability to group items together in what is known as an Item Set.  I think this proved a little awkward when you simply want to submit a batch of photos.  So, I think there is room for both features here.  When there are many items on the same topic, submitted by different people, you can group these items into a set.  But in other instances, you want to submit say, a bunch of photos that pertain to a particular topic, the PhotoSet feature should take care of this.

For example, let's say you receive some chain letter email with a ton of attached photos.  They're pretty good, and worth /not/ deleting.  To submit this to bordom, you can now select "PhotoSet" as a type of submission.  From here, you can add the photos one at a time into an upload queue, which will be uploaded at the time you submit the item, all in one fell swoop.

The item's image will default to the last photo in the upload queue.  This can, of course be overridden at any time by changing the item's image (from the submit preparation page, the submission queue, or from IRC)

In addition to displaying the photos from a set, the photos themselves are presented in "lightbox" fashion.   I think that just about covers it.  Enjoy the new feature.

As always, more to come.

Following the tradition of announcing every little thing I do to the code base, I'm accumulated a few more to let you in on.  (Yes, all 3 of you who are actually reading this)

First, I've moved forward a bit more with the Inline Image Editing (see previous blog post).   With these new advancements, you are able to scrape the item's URL for all images found in that page and select an image to use on the bordom entry.  Pretty cool, I think, and thanks to oblio for this cool suggestion.  Also, the search API integration is complete now, allowing you to search for a phrase - to hopefully find an image that best represents the bordom entry.  I decided to go with Yahoo instead of Google's images service - NOT TO DISTURB JOEYO - but simply because their API documentation was outstandingly better than anything I could find by Google.

Nextly, I've added the ability to "flag" an item as "dupe" or "dead".  Basically, this is the same as hiding an item, but it records why it was hidden via a flag.  This is yet to be implemented on IRC.  It's available for bordom.net admins only via the web.

That's all.

So I've finally gotten around to replacing the dusty image editing tool in the queue.  If you're a regular queue-tender, you'll know that the only way to modify images was to edit an item that didn't already have an image, and from there, enter a URL to an image file somewhere on the internet.   While this wasn't completely a terrible solution, it was very limiting.

What we've got now is far more adequate.  Here are some hilites:

• You can now edit an item's image at anytime, regardless if it already has an image or not.
• You can choose to add an item by way of URL or by file upload.
• You can delete the image altogether.

Perhaps later, I'll get around to putting in a mini-google-image searcher, to make it even easier.  Maybe.

Due to popular demand (from mimo), Bordom.net now has polls. Users can create multiple-choice polls by adding poll topics and supplied responses (up to 5). We may need to expand on the functionality of these polls a bit to make them more intriging... or something.

Each change made to an item (such as its caption, image, etc) is now individually stored. This will effectively enable a historic catalog of all editing that takes place to an item while it's in the queue, or otherwise. As of right now, the only thing that is being done with this new information is listing who an item's current editors are. You can see this list by viewing any item that is currently sitting in the queue.

Below the list of editors, you can now also see the list of people who have voted on the item.

There is more perhaps that could be displayed here; such as what exactly what changed by each person, or even -- whether or not that person voted positively or negatively towards the item. These details will be omitted now, as I'm not sure how useful or un-useful this would be.

I've finally gotten around to updating the sparse documentation for bordom.net's API. It can be seen here: http://bordom.net/help/brax/. Authentication is working properly again and I've starting tinkering with the idea of builting a BRAX module in Ruby using RBot.

As BORDOM's archive of quality continues to grow, we're getting linked to by a growing number of other sites. I've decided to capture this information and display it on the page that's being linked to. It's like saying, hey thanks for the traffic - Now hopefully this will return the favor. Unfortunately many of these links are coming from webmail clients and search result pages. I'll need to work on the exclusion bits more to filter out these kinds of referrals.

By popular request (joeyo), items can have their NSFW status toggled in edit mode. Simply click on the grayscale NSFW graphic to toggle it. Simple and effective.

Photos submitted to bordom or added to submitted items can now be annotated by bordom members. Beneath each photo, you'll find a button for adding new "annotations" to the photo. If the photo is already annotated, you can mouse-over each square to see the note. Clicking on an existing note will allowing for the editing and deleting of notes by others. Have at it -- though keep in mind that this system is new and probably still full of kinks.

Due to uncontrollable circumstances (old hardware), bordom.net has moved once again to a new hosting provider. We experienced a bit of downtime last week during the incident, but have recovered almost 100%. We now seem to be having some slowness issues running on the new host, which we are still looking into....

New content submissions ARE subject to deletion much quicker than before. Here's how it works:

When a submission is added, it has a status of "Pending Moderation" until it is given an excerpt, caption, image, or a tag. Once one of these things are added, the item is now "votable" or "prepped". At this point, the item can be voted upon as usual.

However, if the item remains in the queue unprepped for too long, the ability to "Discard" the item becomes available to voters. It only takes 1 vote to discard to hide the item completely.

Previous, a vote to Discard was simply another way to vote DOWN an item. It now has a new meaning and adds a new function the queue. So, be sure to tend to your items, preparing them for display or else they will likely suffer the wrath of RICKY DISCARDO!

We regret to announce that bordom.net has suffered an incident involving accidental data loss and our most recent backup was made at the end of March. Unfortunately, all submissions made this month (April) have been lost. Due to this incident, we have taken appropriate measures to ensure this does not happen again and are undergoing some restoration attempts. Thank you for your understanding, and I apologize on behalf of all that is bordom.net.

Bordom no longer accepts "blogs" as a type of submission. There are many blogging services out there that are better suited for this sort of thing. We do have intentions to grow the scope of this project but after much consideration, we've decided that providing blogging tools is not our core focus. Apologies in advance to those who may be affected by this change.

The data on the stats page has been slightly enhanced to better reflect some aspects of Bordom.net. Specifically, posted items that are approved are awarded higher scores. You actually will lose points if you're item is not approved. Additionally, your posted items ratings (what others rate it) are factored into the score now. The higher the ratings, the more value is awarded to the item's contributor.

All in all, after doing these changes, I noticed that the overall ranking of people on the site did not change much.

There is a new rating system in place. This system is not to be confused with the existing voting system already in place. In addition to voting on new entries, items that have been approved may be rated upon, as a reflection of their quality. On any given item's view page, you'll notice a set of 5 stars in the upper-right hand corner. If you are logged in, you are able to rate the item from 1 to 5 -- 5 being the highest score. An item's rating is an average of what others think of that item. This rating system will also be used in the stats area for determining an item's popularity, in addition to the number of views and link-clicks it has received.

That's all I have for now -- just wanted to make a formal announcement of this new feature. I'll update the documentation page soon.

Diving in:

Submitted items which are "PENDING MODERATION" now have an additional VOTE DOWN button -- this will hopefully eliminate the case where crappy items were not getting attention. You no longer have to edit the item before voting them down.

Next up, in an attempt to reduce spam -- Items that are hidden are no longer viewable from their respective view pages. This should have been the case long ago, and may have led to the increasing amounts of spam content we've been getting. Someone out there may have realized that their spam links WERE visable (IE: indexed by search engines) even though they were being hidden. This is no longer the case. Hidden items are now truely hidden.

A new feature known as "item grouping" or "sets" was added, allowing us to group related items together. This is similiar to tagging, but intended to be for more specific grouping of related content. See the help page for more.

To speed up the queue listing page, auto-pagination was added -- this means that as you scroll down to the very bottom of the list, the next page will ajaxfully appear.

Some changes to the IRC bot:

The dreaded "Cannot access URL" was fixed. In the past, this means that bordom was unable to retrieve the mimetype of a remote document. Instead of failing the request, we now just simply default to text/html. Most links are HTML anyway, so this should cause any problems. The advantage here is that you'll never get this error again.

By request, the ability to search bordom content from IRC using the !search command was added. See the help page for more.

Next up, a new tool was added to hopefully raise the quality of the autogenerated thumbnail images. I call it.. the "Thumb Cropper". For your own submitted links, if you go into the edit mode of the item, you'll notice a new menu listing one option. "Re-crop thumbnail". You can use this tool to crop the item's image into a new thumbnail. There may still be some quirks using this. It's still fairly experimental at this point.

Lastly, I think I've already announced the chatroom access via Bordom.net, but I wanted to announce it in a different way. We have females in the channel now! So, I think we can agree that feature was a success. ;)

Here is a list of latest changes and updates to the site:

Blog items and Link items have been combined. This separation was causing a barrier which was inhibiting our ability to edit content. For example, the ability to switch an item from a blog to a link was impossible. So, instead of adding complexity, we removed this separation entirely. With the new thinking, an item is an item is an item. It can have a link, a blog text body, a title, excerpt, etc. Everything is optional basically which allows for greater flexibility of managing the content.

Capture feature was removed. You probably even didn't know bordom had the ability to capture URLs as a local PDF. Well, it was completely unused, and turned into clutter/bloat. So, it was removed.

Thumbnail attribute. Since we automatically generate cropped thumbnails from the item images, having an additional thumbnail attribute made little sense. It was removed, too.

Chatroom. A quick and easy-to-use IRC over CGI script was added and is available to registered users, if you are logged in. This gateway will bring you into the #bor IRC channel, which is where the content from this site originates from. (Remember, it started as a URL link dump site from IRC) Once you join, all of the content management abilities are available to you via the IRC bot, named bordom.

Tag it! A new TagIt page was created. This is a list of some items which are not properly tagged and/or prepped for presentation. It serves as a helper for those involved to help keep the content of highest quality.

Syndicated Content features were added. If you'll notice on your private profile page, you have the options to store you YouTube and/or Flickr usernames with us. If they are provided, users will be able to see you syndicated images and/or videos from those sites. This feature is still under development, so you can expect it to be a little better in the future.

Lastly, some work has been done to make the scoring system a little more accurate. Expect your scores to change soon, hopefully in your favor.

Perhaps we should have a "Last Month's Winner" type thing going based on scoring system.

Recently, we've noticed that more and more items hitting the front page have not been properly moderated and prepped for presentation. The result of this leads to cluttering the front page with lots of seemingly random links, with no context. In an effort to reduce the amount of random cluttered on the front page, a change has been made to the queue making it so only items that have been prepped can be voted upon. The logic here is simple. If an item is not presentable for the front page, it will never get voted upon, and thus.. never make it to the front page. Prepping items consists of 1 or more easy steps.

1. Title the items. Use your clever sense of humor to identify what the item consists of. You will receive extra cool points for capitalizing your titles, as well. (yes you,topher)
2. Set a caption and/or excerpt on the items. This helps illustrate the context for the item. Do not use captions and excerpts in place of comments. They each have their reasons for existing. An excerpt is a glimpse of what is inside. A caption is a quote or an initial reaction by the moderator. These should be humorous and anonymous, but they should direct focus to the item -- not the person moderating the item.
3. Set an image and/or thumbnail to the item. Thumbnails are generally better for items that are involve text and more reading. Images are used when the the item consists of a more visual appeal. Images applied to items automatically are made viewable in the Bordom gallery too.

So that's it. With these easy steps, you too can become a great bordom contributor. And remember, knowing is half the battle.

It's been a while since I've updated the changelog. It seems that I only use it to post announcements for new feature additions to the site. Well, that's just what I'll do here. By popular demand, profile images have been added. Users can optionally supply a profile image (200x200), which can be seen on their profile page. Additionally, users' blog page has been ajaxified some more -- giving it an auto-paginating ability when you scroll to the bottom of the page. Lastly, by suggestion of joeyo, comments are now previewable from the front page -- simply click on the maginifying glass near the View Comments link to slide the comments area out.

In case I haven't been abundantly loud about in the past few weeks, it's because I was being cautious, for good reason. I had implemented a big feature on bordom, known as "media". The basic idea was to allow users on IRC the ability to attach "media" files to items, as well as allow web users to upload media files directly to the server. Additionally, these media files would be converted to a standard FLV format, to be used by a Flash-based FLV player. This worked "ok" using FFMPEG for the conversion. However, there are /some/ formats that FFMPEG cannot yet decode, such as a SWF file. The point being, it would be a difficult path to go down the "convert everything to FLV so we can play it" route. So now I've removed all this "media handling" code to make room for a new, more simple approach. Web users can still upload media files directly to the server, identical to how uploaded images are handled. However, the approach to display these media files is quite different. For uploaded media as well as video files that are linked remotely, bordom.net will attempt to display the media with the implementation of "media handler templates".

So, there was an overhaul done to the client authentication part. Instead of relying on file-based sessions, client hostnames are now remembered on the server. If you return back to bordom.net from an recognized IP/hostname, you'll be automatically logged in. If you're coming back from a different IP/hostname, you'll need to first login with your username/password. Upon a successful login, your new hostname/IP will be stored and remembered for next time. This should drastically improve the way logins work. You can view a list of your recognized hostnames from your profile page.

Simply said, today brings us a delicious platter of features. First, we have new interest in our logo/banners. mit3 and mimo have contributed some graphic elements which we can use. Very cool.

Next up, the email parser is now working again. The parser listens for incoming mail messages, parses the bodies for attached images and embedded text links, and submits them to the queue. More on this later, as it is still being developed.

The edit mode has been implemented for all users who are logged in. While in edit mode, you can browse the items as usual but are given the ability to edit items in place by clicking over the parts which you would like to edit.

More to come...

A few things added, some things moved around. That pretty much describes this round of changes. Several things were removed from the BRAX API including item voting and the hit counter. The functionalities should be done by the website only, since they are not really related to "content management", which is the goal of the API. A featured item enhancement was added, allowing users on IRC to feature a current item for their channel. The website now shows any featured items on the right-hand side of the front page.

The formula for determining a successful voted item was changed. Thanks to joeyo, the queue is now much smarter and churns new submissions much more efficiently.

And lastly but not leastly, the AJAX-driven login page should now work fully. Thanks to adjacent for finding the source of the problem.

A few more areas were "ajaxified" to make using a bit easier. This includes the add tag form, the gallery slideshow, as well as the new login block. So yeah, bordom accounts are now implemented but are not required for everyone. Having an account means you are able to maintain a portfolio as well as given special privledges to moderate new submissions in the queue.

Tag words can now be entered at the time a new item is submitted. The bordom queue is a little more "ajaxy" now, allowing you to edit the titles, captions, and item excerpts more easily. A new ajax-driven tag select was added to the Add Tag form. Also in the past month, a new gallery slideshow was added. Heh.

Queue Voting is now the ONLY way to approve / reject items from the queue now. That's right - we've moved into a full democrazy! From both the website as well as IRC, you can cast for vote for items in the queue. You can also now vote positively (+) or negatively (-) for an item in the queue. See the section on queue voting for more information.

As an experiment of sorts, I've added new Queue Voting functionality to the queue page. This allows users to vote on submitted items which are ready to be moved to the bordom front page. Neat eh. Remember to properly tag teh items before putting them up live.

Also today we add new Related Items feature. When viewing an item which has tags, you'll now see thumbnails of other items which share the same tag words. Hopefully this will give the tags *some* usefulness.

First, the image gallery is here!

The XML_RPC API is functional! After a few scrambling hours of trial and error, the IRC robot was rewritten to implement all of its functionality using XML_RPC instead. We'll publish this API in the future we think, pending furthur discussions as to what directions we'll be taking for this project.

Also, we've been discussing ideas for a new Bordom 3.0 rewrite, which would be a massive undertaking involving desktop client software integration. More on this later..

Today I've added javascript auto-completion on the "Add Tag" text field. This should reduce the number of similiar tag words being entered.

The browse page was modified again, to more closely resemble the #bor channel when oblio and joeyo have their /gay fits. Also, the scoring system was tweaked a bit to better reflect the more active contributors. (Hint: Comments are now worth 1/2 a point each)

I've gotten pretty laxed on keeping this changelog accurate, though this doesn't mean that nothing has changed. Bordom has undergone a series of minor tweaks and changes in this past month. More specifically, we've added back the commands approve, hide, and nsfw. The approve command is a stacked command. It removes an item from the queue, then sets its timestamp to the current time. The result is that when you approve an item, that item is made visible to front as if it were just posted at the timeit was approved.

In addition, we've dropped the concept of topics. Initially, tags could be bound to topic names with the bindtag command. This was dropped in favor of a flat tag-only system. The 5 topics on the front page are now a list of the most used tags in the system. Eventually, I'd like to add the ability to associate tags to tags, to tie together similiar tags. This would effectively create a hierarchy of related items when you view a tag. More discussion is likely to be had before this happens.

More neat stuff to share -- The commands nsfw, sfw, hide, and show .. have been removed in favor of a all new chmod command. Using bitwise operations, items now can have many modes associated to them. For now, we have just three: hidden, queued, and nsfw. See the help page for usage examples.

Whoahaha where to start! An onslaught of features are on the way. These include image watermarking, a submission moderation queue, a new tag / topic categorization system, and topics can now be added upon submission. But those are just features... The backend structure was completely revamped as well.

I finally got around to separating the underlying bordom-specific code from the IRC bot, giving Bordom it's own independant API. Currently this is done only in PHP classes, but eventually I'll get around to changing the API to serve requests over XML-RPC.

As an aside, Plik Heavy Industries have graciously provided this project with a dedicated development environment. The developer docs and more information can be found on the plik svn trac.

Well today was a productive, pro-bordom day at the least. As a matter of chance and timing, some new changes were made.. and they were fairly major. Firstly, a new Browse page was added, which provides a view of all the items by their tag words. Relevance / popularity is indicated by the font size of each tag word. For example, the tag lame would be a larger font than the tar hot if more items are tagged as lame.

Secondly, 2 new commands were added. They are excerpt and image. These new commands allow contributors to expound on the caption feature, to allow for more content to be supplied regarding an item. Note, the caption command still exists. Caption is a "reaction" or "blurb" for an item, whereas an excerpt is a "summary" or an "abstract" about the item.

The image command allows contributors to add a thumbnail-sized image to an item's excerpt. Additionally with these 2 commands, there also exists a !delexcerpt and !delimage commands. See the help page for more information on all the commands.

Lastly, comments have been moved to the item's view page. This makes room for the more elaborate captions, excerpts, and images associated to an item. Plus, it also moves bordom's look and feel closer to that of a standard log.

We've moved to a new host, courtesy of plik.net.

Bordom now has a designated channel "hub" where all editing and control must take place. With this, Bordom can sit in other channels and simply listen for posted URLs. Output from the bot is redirected to the hub channel which acts like a notifier in the event of a new link being posted.

There were discussions of a "moderation queue" where newly submitted links go to. This would introduce a new page allow users to view the unmoderated links. New commands would be added to the bot to allow moderators to add these submissions to the front page. This is badly needed as we get into accepting submissions from the outside world. (email, web, etc)

Today we streamline the content viewing somewhat. The search page was removed because it contained alot of duplicate code which made it increasingly difficult to maintain. In it's place, I've added some checks to the front page which looks what "nick", "tag", or "query" strings were requested, if any. So you can view the content pages, but filtered by search contraints. The search page was modified to utilize this. Contributor names are now linked, allowing you to filter content based on the contributor nickname, an arbitrary tagname, or by a search phrase.

A bug was fixed, where updated items were losing their timestamp.

We've also added the ability to add tags to items on their respective view pages.

The submit page was enhanced, allowing users to submit content directly from this site. It supports image uploads and URL submissions.

Support for "tags" were added, but minimally. I'll report more on that later. The search was enhanced to allow searching on content, nick, or a specific tag.

Also, we now default the front page to view entries that are "safe for work" only. We don't want to totally offend people unneccessarily if it can be avoided.

We now reduce the quality of cached images if their filesize is over 100K. This should help reduce the page loading times when there are lots of images to display.

Also, users on IRC with voice mode (+v) are now able to interact with bordom.

All entries that have content-types other than text/html or plain/text are now signified with a mimetype icon beside their titles.

Some new features were added by request. Firstly, quotes that are submitted from IRC now use the nick's name as the quote author instead of the actual person who submitted the quote. (nice one joeyo)

Then we have oblio's suggestions which were implemented today. URLs to the view pages are magically rewritten, allowing us to link directly to: http://bordom.net/view/1234 instead of using GET request.

Also, the channel field was renamed to host; we now store the poster's hostmask. This way we can accept submissions from IRC or the web and track the poster's address. (as opposed to only storing the IRC channel name)

Per adjacent's request, a redirection script was added so that we can track clicks to external URLs.

Also, I started working on a Email->Bordom gateway script. So far so good. See the help page for more on that.

Ok then - today I also added some basic content-type detection to the system. Using some magic mimetypes and the FileInfo extension for PHP, we're able to fetch the mimetype of all submitted links. For now, you can see the mime-types printed on the right of the link itself. It doesn't do anything special. Ideally, we'll have specific ways to handle the presentation of content depending on its mime-type. We'll get to that soon enough.

The stats have been modified to reflect this new information.

Ahh a few new cool things to report this day. Firstly, we now have a custom FireFox extension which allows people to submit links directly to bordom without having to be connected to IRC. This is a big breakthrough into the future direction of this project.

With this change brings the desire to have the IRC bot notify the channel when new content is posted via the web. To solve, new timer functionality was added to the bordom irc module which checks the "queue" for any newly delivered links. Upon finding some, it pushes them through the normal link submission routines.

Oh yeah, and I added captions to items.

Bold and Italics have been added to the comments parser in the style of wikis.

Quotes database activated. Users on the channel can use !addquote to add a quote to the database. A random quote can be view by using !quote in the channel. A random quote can also be seen at the bottom of the bordom.net pages.

Good news mesays. Many of the final touches for this project were added tonight. The bot commands are now like that of the original Bordom, which was running DiaWebLog. The "letter referencing" is now working, see the help page for information on this. There may be some bugs to discover, so let me know what you find.

Simply put, searching is now available! =) It's quite smart too.

More cool things to report this day. After talking a bit with Manick, the author of PHP-IRC, I was able to change the bots behavior to be more like that of the old Bordom. Links are now automatically fetched from each line spoken on IRC, unless prepended by a special character (~,+,!). Also, today introduces the !delcomment command. Users can now delete unwanted comments from the website.

The website was redesigned today as well. We're using a modified Kubrick layout, which it plenty slick and clean. I'm not too sold on the whole *junkyard* image I used for the new Bordom2 logo, but it will do for now.

A view page was added as well. You can now click on a link's ID to view the link in a single page. The ability to add a comment from the web is now possible. When you add a comment, your nick is stored in a cookie for 1 week. Kinda similiar to a blog, eh? Oh yeah, we have stats now too.