It only took 6 years...

...But I have finally redesigned the Journal.

I believe I said that the Journal redesign would be well underway in March and be up and ready by sometime at the end of the summer. I think I said that back in 2004 and then again in 2005. Well, it's 2006 and I put some time aside so I can finally finish what I started many a year ago.

The idea...

Before the advent of MySpace, blogspot, and insert-latest-blogging-site-here, I had this idea where a bunch of people who knew other can post their story. Obviously, with the popularity of these "journaling" sites which was then turned into "blogging", this idea lost its originality. However, I still want to create a place where authors come to share their story. And what is unique about their story is not that they will tell just a story but their side of their story. These authors would be connected through their stories since they really did experience life together.

Authors will be able to critique and edit each other's scribes. j2 will implement a strict journaling (or logging) system so that any edit can roll back to any previous scribe. I want the reader to pick a timeline and a set of authors and read their stories. From that point (depending on the authors), we will see a story unfold.

That's the idea. Will it work? Probably not... at least not on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd try. j2 will be a work in progress. The only way it will work is through a strong and dedicated collaboration of authors. It's a neat idea that I came up with during Single Thread's Chatsworth days. It is now a lost page, but there used to be a place on Single Thread where I would begin one story and everyone came in to write it. (Not an original idea, but we had a lot of people contributing to the story for a long period of time.)

That said, I doubt I can use any of the 2800+ scribes already posted to j2 (from the original Journal). Many of the potential authors in those scribes are long gone (lost ties). Time to start anew. But in the meantime, the original scribes will be in place until j2 is ready to accept new authors.

FYI: j2 uses a different set of security mechanisms. If you had a keyphrase for the original Journal, you cannot use them for j2. You can still find the original Journal at its original location: http://journal.singlethread.org. Sorry, the original Journal at Single Thread no longer exists. All keys for the original Journal no longer work.

Technical tidbits...

Okay, okay... despite finding time to create the second generation Journal, I did not write the design (or its tools such as the menu and online html editor) for j2. The web has evolved since the last time I wrote in HTML and CSS that I did it the lazy way and found myself a decent looking template. The design of this page is by FullAhead and it is called LazyDays. I slightly modified the template to fit j2 (not much has really changed).

The unbelivably large and unoptimized scribe menu on the left uses the hmenu javascript library from Dynarch.com. It's probably the easiest DHTML menus I have ever used. And I believe them when Dynarch says that their menu is the best one out there. I coded the tree for the new menu in a couple of hours (most of the problems I got from coding this menu wasn't from the menu itself but from mismatching database data from j2 and the original Journal). The menu script I wrote for the original Journal is at least 5 times the size of this new one. Unfortunatly, the unoptimized menu for j2 makes j2's home page 25 times (!!!) larger than the home page for the Journal. That problem lies on the fact that j2's menu loads all 2800+ scribes making j2's home page over 250k! (I'll be working with Dynarch to see if I can use some AJAX action to call the scribes when an event is called instead of having all 2800+ scribes loaded the first time you load the page.)

If you view any of the hardcopy scribes (transcribes), then you'll see how j2 shows the cyphers. Instead of opening a new window, j2 will pop open the cypher via a tooltip. You can check out WZ's tooltips at his site to get a better understanding of what I'm talking about.

Finally, the last library I used is from Interakt. It's their Online HTML Editor. This library makes copying/pasting from Word more seemless and you are able to add and edit images to your scribes. If you become an author for j2, then you will use this editor to post your scribes and upload your edited media. Readers of j2 will have to check out Interakt's website to check out the Online HTML Editor

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