When we first put together a comment reply page, we knew we were far from finished. We had plans to ultimately build a complete private messaging system for soLinkable. And throughout the past week we’ve been working diligently to get our new and improved messaging system up-and-running… Who am I kidding – We threw a bunch of code together at the last minute and hoped for the best.

The new messaging system offers a few improvements to soLinkable:

1. Private messaging. You can now send a private message to any user through soLinkable. This will make it even easier to communicate with the admins (or anyone else for that matter).
2. Display all messages and replies. The first page in your message center displays a collection of all messages and replies you’ve received, ordered by descending date. This includes replies to your comments, top level comments on stories you’ve submitted, and private messages (both sent and received).
3. A new eye-catching envelope link. Do you know when you have a new message or reply? Probably not. A blue envelope on a blue theme just isn’t very noticeable. So we’ve redone the image to make it stand out a little better, which will (hopefully) allow for more conversation.
4. Much faster page loads with fewer queries. We’ve done some serious optimization to the comment and messaging systems. You won’t notice a huge improvement right away, but as soLinkable continues to grow these improvements will go a long way (If you want to get a little technical, we drastically reduced our database calls, cutting the execution time by 33%).

So… How Do I Use It?

Look at the top right corner of soLinkable. Are you signed in? Do you see that envelope? Good. That’s the link to your message center. For the most part, the envelope will appear blue. However, when you have unread items in your message center, the envelope will alert you by turning a sort of orange-red:

Clicking on the envelope will bring you to the main page of the new soLinkable message center, which lists the 25 previous conversations you’ve had on soLinkable. A conversation includes any private messages, replies to your comments, or first-level comments made to a story you’ve submitted. The basic setup of the page is as follows:

• Menu Items: Easily navigate through the different screens within the soLinkable message center.
• Type Of Message: Displays information regarding the type of message. Can be either a private message, post reply, or comment reply.
• Title Bar: The who, what, and when. This information bar will indicate the username, subject (if applicable), and date of the message or comment.
• Message Body: The actual content.

Next, let’s move to the “Compose” page. This is where you’ll go to write a private message. The layout and input textboxes are pretty self-explanatory. To, Subject, Message… All basic stuff.

The error checking at this point in time is pretty basic, it just checks to ensure you’ve entered a subject, message body, and valid username – No fancy jQuery validation engines yet. However, there is some simple AJAX going on in the background to help ensure the person you’re trying to contact exists. When you move the focus away from the “To:” field, it will contact the soLinkable servers and return whether the user exits or not. Simple but handy.

The Indox/Sent folder contains a list of all messages, beginning with the newest first:

And finally, clicking the subject will open it up in the view message template:

More improvements to come

It’s still in a beta phase, so expect some minor changes in the next few days as we try to work out the kinks. And if you’ve never played the role of a beta tester but always wanted to, here’s your chance. Play around with it and let us know what you think: Are there any bugs? Is it intuitive and easy-to-use? What would you do differently?

So get on it – Check out the soLinkable message center!

comment, feature, messaging, solinkable

…I sort of suspected that our contact form hadn’t been working as we hadn’t gotten any mail in almost three weeks. Turns out I was right! But more importantly, it’s fixed.

The biggest issue here was that there was no mention that the message wasn’t being sent, it just appeared to work normally. There was a reason for this. Not a good reason, but a reason. When I was doing my testing I commented out the actual “mail(…)” code for obvious reasons. Then, when I uploaded my tested code, I forgot to comment it out… and test it live… And so here we are. But no worries, all is now well.

So, to make a long story short, if anyone has attempted to contact us in the past few weeks, please resubmit and we will happily reply

oops, solinkable

What exactly does that mean? Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). If you are a frequent Reddit commenter you will be very familiar with it as it uses the same system.

How does this benefit you, the commenter? The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

How does it work? A full instructional guide can be found under syntax on the project website or check out the Dingus to try out a live version of Markdown. But first, let me give you a quick and easy overview:

Paragraphs are delimited by a blank line. Simply starting text on a new line won’t create a new paragraph; It will remain on the same line in the final, rendered version as the previous line. You need an extra, blank line to start a new paragraph. This is especially important when dealing with quotes or lists.

Italic text can be displayed by surrounding a word (or words) with either single asterisks (*) or single underscores (_). Bold text can be displayed by surrounding a word (or words) with either double asterisks (**) or double underscores (__).

This is in *italic text*

This is in **bold text**

Will give you:

Blockquotes are created by using email-style > characters. Multiple angle brackets can be used for nested quotes. To cause a new paragraph to be quoted, begin that paragraph with another angle bracket.

>Here's a quote.

>Another paragraph in the same quote.
>>A nested quote.

>Back to a single quote.

Will give you:

Linking can be done in two ways. First, you can just paste a valid URL, which will be automatically parsed as a link. Or, you can write the anchor text inside of square brackets – [ ] – followed by the URL in parentheses.

http://en.wikipedia.org
[wikipedia]http://en.wikipedia.org

Will give you:

Headers can be created by surrounding the text with the # symbol. The number of #’s used corresponds with the header level.

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3
#### Header 4
##### Header 5
###### Header 6

Will give you:

Unordered Lists can be created by appending each element in the list with either a plus (+), dash (-), or asterisk (*) followed by a space. Operators can also be mixed.

+ Item 1
- Item 2
* Item 3

Will give you:

Ordered lists are created in roughly the same way. Begin the list with a number plus a period (.) followed by a space. It’s important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark the list have no effect on the output. The ordered list will always start with the number 1, and will increment sequentially.

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

Will give you:

Code Blocks are created by wrapping it with backtick quotes (`).

Here is some `inline code with **formatting**`

Will give you:

Escaping special characters can be done with a backslash (\). Backslash escapes are used to generate literal characters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown’s formatting syntax.

Escaped \*italics\*

Will give you:

That’s it! There are other great ways to use Markdown, but we’ll leave that until later posts. Thanks to redditor AnteChronos for his great explanation as well (much of which I used in this post).

comment, feature, solinkable

Another update has come and gone for soLinkable.com. This update saw the creation of a number of new categories including Business, Internet, and Green. We also split News/Politics into their own separate categories. The additional categories should be a good fit for the soLinkable community and I can easily change them or add new ones, as requested by the community. I decided upon the new categories based on what type of stories I’ve been seeing posted recently. All old stories will remain in their proper categories, with any stories posted to “News/Politics” remaining in the new “News” category. If you guys have any other categories that you would want to see be sure to let me know, I’m always up for new ideas.

This should be the beginning of improvements to the category section. I still see some outstanding issues with the system that’s currently in place. I also hope to write a sort of “subreddit” system. I really like the idea and it’s definitely a great feature (if you’re unsure about what it is, head on over to Reddit and check it out). It will be a bit of a challenge but I think I’m up for it.

I also made some huge improvements to the actual core code including many optimisation improvements. We effectively cut the number of calls to the SQL server in half for an average page load. The issue here wasn’t with the existing SWCMS framework, but rather with features that I have chosen to omit (as they didn’t quite fit with the site – ie. the pageviews table). A typical user won’t notice any of these changes, but as long as I did them correctly, our server will definitely thank us .

I have also updated the “About Us” page and given it a better overall look. It now has a short bio (and picture) featuring both myself and Krystal. Be sure to check it out (and  comment on Krystal’s flower hat).

Thanks again for your support!

categories, solinkable, update

I know. You’ve been waiting for this update for some time… I mean, boy, that old one was ugly. The new form uses the proper soLinkable typography and colours. I also added the “remember me” functionality so that you can stay logged in as long as you want. Let’s just forget that slightly grey, imageless, and overall ugly popup login form ever existed.

On another note, we have a very slick new feature on its way. Seriously. Not to give it all away just yet, but we will be doing away with that awful websnapr.com thumbnail. I never enjoy relying on a third party in order to properly display my site. Expect a release in the next week or so.

Also, we have a few ideas on the way for the category system. Think subreddits.

More to come in a bit!

new, solinkable, update