Liberal Arts Major
Custom Data and Author Profile Text
Click on my username. You should see my whois page has been pimped out with a "custom data" section. If you go to your own user info page you will likewise notice a "custom data" section populated with five "[Click to edit]" fields (the information is saved when the text box loses focus). These things allow you to define basically any additional bit of information about yourself: the boxes on the left constitute a definition for the information (like my "Favorite Pastime") whereas those on the right are for the information itself. The data only appears elsewhere if both fields are populated for a single row. There's a 350-character limit for both types of data.
The inspiration for this came two years ago via Facebook, but I only just now came up with a compelling reason to implement it (see below). I picked five fields because I wanted to start somewhere and see how it worked; this system may change at some time in the future.
(Note that this whole affair might not work in some browsers; I only tested FF and Chrome.)
While you're looking at your user info page, take a peek at the user profile editor. You'll see a pretty self-explanatory field that wasn't there before: "Author Profile Text". But where does this information go? Author pages? What are those?
Author Pages
It goes on pages like this one (which you can also access by the "Author Page" link that replaces "Articles" in the message details bar). The original version of TFN, which was coded entirely by me using only HTML and some pitiful Javascript, was basically just my blog: the home page was just a rudimentary list of "updates" with links to articles (and the background was a totally rad lightning storm thing). This, to some extent, is replicated on the homepage here - but it only catalogues articles and Network Announcements posts, so fiction entries get lost in the mix and only admins get in on the blog-like action.
I decided to give everyone access to a page like that, which I have called an author page for lack of a better descriptive term. All of your articles and chapters will appear there in timestamp order, as if they were on the front page (with chapters taking their subtitle descriptions from their project's description). But what about the posts from a board?
If you click the comments link on the "Had a girlfriend bus she broke your heart" entry on my author page, you're taken to my personal board, A Heartbreaking Work. Each author page looks through the topics in your personal board(s) for those topics marked "post to author page" and does just that. For now, only the board owner can post topics in this way, but in the future (sometime) I'll make it so the owner can post any topics on one of his or her boards. I'll also make it so posted topics can be removed. (Currently, this can be done by closing the topic.)
Author pages are only half of the self-indulgence palooza. You may have noticed a link on my author page to something called an author profile: the other half.
Author Profiles
These pages are meant to replace the "all articles by X" listing and aggregates both articles and projects (as you can see from Kenri's). They also prominently feature all of that custom data you can now toss around, in addition to the author profile text next to your avatar (if you have one).
The motivation for this was that I wanted something better to replace the author article listing and I wanted to aggregate projects in the same place. However, I thought having a "profile" type page analogous to a whois page would be pretty unexciting if there wasn't any way to edit the content, so I spent some time thinking about how that could fit into the author page. Then I remembered my custom data idea from way back, and suddenly author pages had a partner in crime. (And by suddenly, I mean several painful hours of work later.)
That ends the planned updates which directly impact the contribution system. There are a lot of refinements that need to be made (deleting chapters comes to mind), but I have some other stuff in mind, and some completely untenable projects like scum, before I return to fix things. So perhaps you can think of the work I've done on the system in the past week as an alpha or beta release. Yeah, that sounds right.
Editor
But B) I don't seem to be able to edit my custom data, and it also seems like I enjoy pretending to be a computer programmer? <_< (And I'm using Firefox, so that's not the problem.)
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"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
New Moderator
It should work now.
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~ Ogordemir ~
When I feel like being awesome in another way.
Editor
And it does indeed work now. <_<
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"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic