traas.org

Finally... I've been working for weeks to lay the foundations for this, but now there are blog-style comments on all of the news entries! The database design has been done for ages, and the comment rendering has worked. It was just a matter of a submission form... which is now completed. Now, click on the "comments" or "read more" link on each entry to see the comments others have left.

Why did this take me so long? Well, there was a lot of ground work that needed to be done. The first was implement PHP session handling, which at first broke the site due to its URL handling. In absense of cookies, it appended &PHPSESSID=[session id #] at the end of every URL. Seeing as this isn't valid in XHTML 1.1, I had to reconfigure PHP to use the XHTML entity & instead of &.

So once I got the sessions going, I had to implement transparent message passing of error messages through session variables. This was, actually, pretty easy.

Finally, I had to validate and test the input from the submission forms. First, I strip ALL HTML-like stuff from the posts, and just replace the special characters with thier appropriate entities. I then validate the email address, and check to make sure all the required fields are filled out. Finally, I had to build a moderation system; I don't want blog-spam bots just filling me up, and I don't want a turing test.

What does this mean? EVERY comment is moderated, no exception. You won't see a comment you post until I moderate it.

ANYway, enough techno-babble from me. Enjoy!