Slow progress these past few weeks as work has taken up a bit of energy and time. The site has launched for the initial round of analytics gathering; analytics is all guest focused at this time. Still working on registration related issues, adding a few more features, and implementing user levels across the site. One of my big registration tasks on my roadmap is reserved usernames. These names are stuff like "admin," "you," "edit," etc etc. Names that I could possibly use for functions or cause confusion.

Also, I plan on switching from a username based login to an e-mail login. It's not super imperative but when I initially made this switch I got an error when signing in. So, now it's more of a WTF kind of curiosity than anything since it should have been as simple as changing one line of the code. Or so I thought... Another annoying bug is that user profiles are only visible when logged in. I know why it happens so I just need to come up with a fix to address it - it's probably in how I ordered the logic statements really - but it's pretty low on the "todo" list.

The main issue holding me back from fully launching is an e-mail issue. All mail sent via mail() is ending up in my Spam inbox. It sounds like it's an issue with how I'm set up with my host. If I "purchase" a mail package with my host, it should resolve this issue. I'm just waiting for tomorrow so I can chat with support about lingering questions. Discussions with Kerm pointed that it's likely a DKIM and SPF issue. Not sure that's something I can manually address with my hosting provider and will be part of our chat tomorrow.

Had a period where I felt like being a homebody, so I dove into this project again and made some minor progress! Activation e-mails are still plaguing me but I managed to switch logging in from usernames to an e-mail address, I'm not sure what the issue was before but I think I may have failed to update a table name along the way or something stupidly obvious.

I want to switch my focus to more user management stuff now. Such as allowing users to change their names, their password, and update their e-mail address. Probably more pressing, however, is getting more content added so I can start learning about searching through a database, since that's one of the public facing aspects of the site that still isn't functional. I also need to implement content tags, more categories, and other metadata to the submissions.

Pushed my first commit since June 2018. Progress is still slow but I plan to pick this back up again at some point. No major changes but started filling in the advertisement placeholders with real ad code; getting approved to run ads was the motivator and I plan to use that motivation as an incentive to find more time to code the site and add content.

Even though this likely won't end up as I dreamt it to be, it's great to (slowly) learn something!

One of my pet peeves is misinformation. I was browsing imgur one day a few years back, when "fact dumps" were super popular. I enjoyed them but wanted to follow up on more than a few. They were so outlandish, hard to believe, and just so out there. Turns out, I wasn't the only one with these thoughts.



I did some digging, and the websites were just sketchy. Riddled with ads, no search bar, no source links, and some even accepted visitors to submit facts. Simply asking that the "facts" be real. That really, sealed it for me. These fact websites don't put a lot of effort into curating and checking their facts. However, all isn't lost as I did find one fact website that provided sources.

The facts on that website did not have dedicated pages, which made linking back to the facts incredibly difficult. You could link to the page the fact shared with 60+ others. The page had no text or titles, so searching the page was impossible. Notice the insane amount of ads on that site? All the fact sites I visited were hosted on Tumblr or Wordpress, basically existed to be ran and hosted as cheaply as possible so they could generate as much money as possible.

I wanted to address these issues. It took me a few years but I eventually started in 2017, which is when I started this topic.

I finally picked this project up again. Too many of my friends on FB are sharing things on Facebook without checking them first. I kept putting time and effort into correcting them but realized this energy would be better spent working on this website.

That project? Click, For Your Information.

The TL;DR: All facts have a dedicated page with sources clearly listed and available. Facts must be submitted with a source and users vote on the accuracy of the facts by voting on the sources. My thought here is that this will prevent people from voting based of the titles. It's far from perfect but it's a great compromise. I've even thought about sharing facts, and have a plan to export facts on images with QR codes, so they can be easily scanned with a phone and bring the viewer to the dedicated page.

Yesterday I implemented an automatic dark mode, the first update to the production server in two years; the first update to the development server in one.

I don't ever expect this to get popular, but it's a great mental exercise and a time sink when I'm stuck inside 🤪