kaolinfire

finally sat down and spent the three hours to get follow-up reminders working with writer's planner, my submissions tracking website. It's not as smooth as it could be, but... hey, it's something, right? You'll need to edit your account to accept the reminder emails. :)

Also did the tiniest bit of SEO manipulation--added keywords and a description to all pages, and posted about it on two sites I found by searching for "submission tracking".

Added a longer detail page of all your submissions on http://writersplanner.com.

still to do: export to csv; nice sorting everywhere (yeah, some day); follow-up dates/reminders; tags tags tags tags; blog?; easier/inline addition of markets/subscription to markets

http://www.thebroth.com/writersplanner

A few things of ultra niftiness, the technical bits of which you can get off of their developer's blog (when it's not being pounded)

My immediate 'sproing' was the idea of offering a free service, letting you brand it, taking my name almost entirely off, but still grabbing the advertising moolah (yeah, yeah, advertising moolah is more of a crapshoot than anything other than actually going out and shooting craps... and perhaps shooting craps is more reliable, who knows?)

And the social dynamics are interesting, especially in that there is no way to communicate _beyond_ the moving of pieces. And who is moving them, apparently, though I missed that functionality -- http://www.thebroth.com/blog/111/the-karma-and-exile-system

Writersplanner now has a 'quickfind' searchbox that is AJAX enabled. Whee! Of course, it works like a normal thing if javascript is not enabled, and none (or almost none) of the javascript is on the page (I should move the last bit off... it's at the bottom of the page, and really doesn't need to be, I believe) It has it when you're logged in, at least. No point in confusing folks with a search bar when they're just figuring out what the system is.

Noticed that the Firefox Firebug debugging console extension thingy has a 'ShowHttpXmlRequests' option. So freaking awesome!

Not that they do any real good for anything at the moment, but since I decided timezones were a blocking issue for "alerts", they got done. This is a bit bass-ackwards, but I eventually started with http://laughingmeme.org/articles/2003/09/25/timezone-selector

That's a bit of perl code that dumps the data from DateTime, DateTime::TimeZone, and/or DateTime::Locale -- into a nice little javascript selector box. I wanted to avoid the javascript so I hacked it to dump the regions/cities into a little php hash of arrays. Now I can play with it at my leisure, but for now it's a single select box with all the combinations. A bit long, but functional. Ideally, I'll add some behaviour tags to make it split the single select into a nifty combo select when javascript is available. Really, really not necessary though.

The DateTime perl module(s) use the near-canonical Olson Database. Of course, using that whole crazy database just to get

This is my timehack. I know my server's Eastern, so that's the way all the data's gone into mysql, and that's how the data comes out. I don't want to go and change the data unless I absolutely have to, so...
well, it's kind of sad, but it appears to work. :)

  function altertz($datetime,$timezone) {
    if (empty($datetime)) return $datetime;
    //we have something that is a datetime "assumed" to be correct,
    //most likely coming from mysql, and we need to nudge it around.
    //ICK!

    //first, we set timezone to the 'real' timezone the data was created
    //in.  for writersplanner, that's "eastern"
    $oldtz = getenv("TZ");
    putenv("TZ=US/Eastern");

    //then, turn our time into a unix stamp
    $time = strtotime($datetime);

    if (!$timezone) { $timezone = "GMT"; }

    putenv("TZ=".$timezone);
    $retval= date("Y-m-d H:i:s T",$time);

    putenv("TZ=".$oldtz);
    return $retval;
  }

Of course, with all this, the only thing that's changed at the moment is ... display of account creation/validation/last login datetimes. But that's proof of concept, right? ;)

http://writersplanner.com is very minimally open for business. Still alpha, but shouldn't break, and is hopefully already somewhat useful.

Enter your pieces and keep track of acceptance/rejection/etc. Keep track of where you want to send things, still.

Thoughts appreciated. :)