Shoutbox (a.k.a Tagboard)
Recently the question about me not having a tagboard on my blog site resurfaced during a meeting with Jun Yaik and Eric. Previously there were also several others who enquired, but I just put them off simply with No use for one.
But now I figured that there’s a need to address this concern once and for all.
Another reason is because commenting system exists for a reason — A comment system allows users to post their own comments on an article or “thread.”
So do start using them so they won’t cry because everyone prefers tagboards.
Fact is, I understand the tagboard serves totally different purpose. Sort of like letting guests be interactive and post something that is without regards to any blog entries. Or something I think.
And I think Wikipedia does the explanation better than I do:
A shoutbox or tagboard is a chat-like feature of some websites that allow people to quickly send messages to each other without requiring a post to a standard Internet forum or the use of a separate medium such as IRC.
In their simplest form, they are simply a list of short messages, and possibly information about their author.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a shoutbox on this blog — who would? But I mind having one that destroys all my conscious efforts. Efforts to produce HTML that complies with the web standards. I am not a crazy standard freaks, but having put in that much efforts only to be wasted on something that is redundant is plain dumb.
And I’ve done some googling and none of the shoutboxes turned up promising with regards to this issue. Most of them are table-based when the messages should really be displayed in an unordered list instead — call this obsession but yes.
The one that doesn’t use table had decided to use div instead. This is a better approach than using a table (albeit being as non-semantic) but too bad it’s made the mistake of using the same ID name for every message, producing invalid mark up as well. What a pity because that’s the closest to standard-oriented mark up for a shoutbox I’ve came across so far. If they would only change to uls instead of divs, and use classes instead of ID then it would be cool.
Besides most of all these shoutboxes either use iframe, or have embedded messages that require a full page refresh to get new messages, or just don’t look appealing to me. And that’s why I refuse to put any of those in my blog page.
Realising these problems I have with the shoutboxes available, I’d set off to write my own a few months back (or maybe a year back). With my very limited knowledge of AJAX and PHP/mySQL, I wrote a little scriptlet that does this job the way I want it albeit lacking the robust administration features. Then Eric took the PHP codes and implemented some administration controls, turning it into something more powerful than the original version, and now I’m waiting to bring his code and incorporate it with some simple AJAX to become something I’ve dreamt of using.
And all I need now is to get the codes that he had modified and then find time to work on it, which admittedly may take a (long) while. And this explains why I do not have a shoutbox.
Yet.
Don’t worry. One day I will have it, but not today. Not today.