It’s been a week since the last What Do You Want To See post, and I’d like to talk about (a) what’s new/changed, and (b) what else could happen.

1. Profile pages! If someone comments while logged in, clicking on their name in the byline of that comment will now take you to their profile page, rather than their listed URL (which is displayed on the profile page instead). Here’s mine.

It needs some linking-up that’ll I’ll do in the next few days; right now, the only way to get there is to click on a comment byline or go to http://bigbigquestion.com/author/username/ or http://bigbigquestion.com/?author=userid which (just redirects to the username version).

The fields listed on the page are based on what you’ve filled out in the Wordpress Profile form, which you can access from this link if you’re logged in.

Having said all that: what else would you like to see, or what would you like to see different, etc, on the profile pages?

2. Fave/vote experiments! I’ve been playing with a couple different voting widgets, in hopes of finding a good fit for post-voting and favorite/bookmarking functionality. As of right now, every comment has a little AJAXy green thumbs-up button on it; click on it and you should see the button go grey and the count go up.

There’s also a per-post voting widget; in fact, here it is now:

10 votes, average: 1 out of 1 (10 votes)
You need to be a registered member to rate this post.
Loading ... Loading …

It should work similarly. This latter widget is more useful under the hood than the comment-voting widget — it tracks activity by username rather than IP — but I’m likely to cannibalize one or both and just build a unified version from scratch to handle our voting/faving/bookmarking needs; following on that, I’d hope to include clickable records on user profiles pages and have lists of Good Stuff.

Per-post voting would also be very useful for…

3. User Questions! I’ve set up a two things, both of which are still in progress:

- Post a New Question page

- See All Questions page

If you’re logged in, you should be able to post a new question just by filling out the title and content fields and hitting post. There’s even a preview button. Hot.

The all-questions page lists every question posted, in chronological order, with the question title, user, categories, and number of comments. However, a question will not appear on the front page of Big Big Question without some magical admin approval; how to manage that process elegantly in the future is an open question, but that’s one of the places where the voting/favorite system could be fun and handy.

A couple of big notes on this:

- There is currently no mechanism to limit posts. I’ll put one in place at some point soon, but for now I’ll simply ask that you show some restraint and not go postin’ crazy.

- Pretty much all of this is duct-tape patchwork; if you find something broken, please let me know so we can get it fixed instead of bringing the dang site down.

4. TODO/Open Questions?

There’s a bunch of things — some mentioned explicitly above — that need/want doing. If you have any specific requests or suggestions or brainstorms or dire predictions, bring ‘em on.

On big thing: the all-questions page needs it’s own name, I think. It’s the open-conversation, askme-ish counterpart to the One A Day experience of the front page of BBQ. My favorite suggestion so far: “The Kitchen”, evoking that universal point of congregation at any house party.

So! Have at it! Try not to break anything.

Posted by Josh Millard