A few days’ laziness (by which I mean a few days’ Starcraft) have passed with not much work being done on “a thousand words”. That came to an end tonight, with a productive evening resulting in a working profile system so that users can now add and display personal information, change their registered e-mail address and password, etc.

There’s now a database backend for the voting and commenting systems, which will be complemented by their GUI pages tomorrow night.

Once that’s done, that’s the last of the main functions out of the way and we’re basically down to tweaks. I think we ought to, in no particular order:

• Decide on what formatting users can add to stories, and filter for it

• Add a word count, and possibly limit submissions to e.g. 600-1400 words

• Add a means of reporting stories and pictures for e.g. copyright issues

• Add a means of rating stories, so users can mark them as containing sex, violence etc.

• Create an admin interface, so we don’t just have to run the site with raw SQL queries

• Add ranks, etc. (incentives for achieving high Total Stars)

• jQuery up some of the main bits to improve user experience

• Implement the scrolling list of pictures for users to select when creating a new story

At that point, I think it should be ready for open beta. Hopefully we can get it all done within a week, before I depart for internet-less shores!