I've removed the comment form from below each post here and replaced it with a Noodle button. I figured there's no sense in making a website devoted to instant commenting if I'm not going to use it myself.

This does coincide with the evil evil spambots cracking my (previously thought to be impregnable) anti-spam system earlier this week but it isn't related. Honest. Darned spam. So it may not have been impregnable but it had a fairly decent run. It lasted seven months and several tens of thousands of attempts to bypass it. Oh well.

At least Noodle uses Google Accounts. If spam starts to come through on it, I'll just remove the ability to post anonymously so everyone will need a google account. I'd rather not do that unless I really have to, though.

I think my latest little project is pretty much done. It still doesn't work absolutely perfectly in Internet Explorer 6 but I figure I'll fix that if enough people ask me to.

So, here it is: Noodle.

"Okay, what is it?", I hear you ask (I don't but play along). Noodle is a variation on a good old-fashioned forum except that every page on the internet has its own thread. Any time you're looking at something, you just press a button and you get to see the discussion for that page. Sometimes a page won't have any comments on it for months (or ever, even), sometimes a page will be extremely busy.

The pages that are currently the most popular will appear on the Noodle homepage (it's set to show the top 10 at the moment but I might change that) along with the most recent comments.

"So, where's this magic button?" you ask (you're full of questions today, aren't you?). It's here:

If you're using Firefox with the bookmarks bar switched on or Opera with the status bar switched on, you can just grab the button, yank it off the page and drag it to your bar. If you're using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, right-click and 'Add to Favourites'. Bear in mind that IE6 is...flaky at times.

Known issues
At the moment, the 'Most popular now' section looks a bit daft, seeing as it only has 1 site in it.

The google account login screen is cut off at the top.

The google logout screen gives a nastly looking error. This is a problem at google's end. Apparently, you don't get this error in the USA but you do in the UK and Japan.

Nicknames are cut short. After my earlier musings, I decided the safest way to display nicknames (until google fix it) is just to trim bits out. If anyone has a better RegEx for doing this than the one I'm using, let me know.

I'm sure I'll post more about this soon, I'm now off to bang my head against IE for a while.

Yes, I do need better hobbies.

A quick transcript of the conversation I had with my barber just as I was about to leave:

Barber: Do you have an umbrella?
Me: No, is it raining? (look outside, it's not)
Barber: Ah, wait a second
Barber runs off through the back, comes back with an umbrella.
Barber: Please, take this.
Me: But it's not raining.
Barber: Ah, but it might.
Me: No, really, it's okay, I live just round the corner.
Barber: (looking sad) Please? You don't even need to bring it back.

I took the umbrella. He also gave me a hairbrush.

My latest pointless programming project is just about finished. There's just one little bit left to figure out and then it's done.

I'm building this using the new Google AppEngine system (mostly because I needed an excuse to learn python) but there seems to be a bit of a problem with the User object. They haven't finished the User nickname bit yet so when you sign into an AppEngine application or site using a standard Google Account, it uses the bit of your e-mail address that comes before the '@' and, although Google accounts can use any e-mail address, the majority of them will be gmail.com or googlemail.com. This means that if you want to make any kind of public forum, you have to do one of the following:

• Implement your own nickname system (not really in the spirit of a unified User object)


• Obfuscate the nickname before displaying


• Display the nickname and open users up to spam or other unwanted e-mail

None of these are particularly great. If it were even possible to access the user's first name, that'd solve the problem but, until the nickname functionality is finished, it's not as useful as it could be.

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As an aside, doing a project in python means that I've written code in pretty much every mainstream (i.e. not esoteric) programming language except COBOL.