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Blog Posts - English

- Web: Block by Country
- The Shoutbox
- Web Design Tips
- Keyboard Cleaning Time
- Backup made Easy
- Skype: Power to the People

The Shoutbox
June 29 2009

So here's a post to explain about my shoutbox, what it does and where it will go.

I've been enjoying the idea of a shoutbox quite a lot for a few years because it's a simple and fast way to be in contact with others when there's no Instant Messenger around. I've learned the original script and way to code it from one of those damn smart people, the one who once created the Klompenboard Forum software. Basically he taught me this and also the importance of securing such an application by using MySQL instead of using flat-files (external text file that has CHMOD 777).

For a while I was really out of creating something remotely close to websites and I dropped the idea of ever creating a shoutbox again. In fact, by accident I lost every old website that I had on one of my hard disks, thus scripts, SQL, etc.. all gone. That too was a setback but I got over that part rather quickly.

By creating this site, I decided to have a shoutbox again. I know it won't be visited at all, but that's not really why I was making it anyways. To me it's more of a project to keep me busy and learning more while having a life without computers these days. The last few days I've improved my shoutbox with several things and I will continue to make it the best script ever so that I can share it under the GNU License Agreement.

Done:

To do:

Anyways, to explain about the things I've done. I've introduced Shavatars, which is short for Shoutbox Avatars. Even though a shoutbox usually doesn't have an accompanying image, I decided to just make it more fun by adding such images. Of course I am using the .PNG format for the Shavatar images. This is mainly to keep the standards but also to keep things run fast.

Which brings me to the Message colors. After a talk with Miss Twilight6 I decided to implement colors to personalize it a bit when it comes to the messages people post. This is done by using the <span> tag and it Works like a charm. The Name and Dates will remain black!

Now comes the limited BBCode. In my experience in the past, spammers and flooders use HTML and BBCode to post those annoying links to other websites. I decided NOT to go with this. A shoutbox is to leave a message and NOT to promote your gear. So no Links, Images and other stuff that might make the shoutbox to load slow. As you might see, I have not implemented the Underline tag [u] in this. To me, and many other people, this is just to underline HTTP Links, not to underline a piece of text.

Having spoken about the BBCode and its attempt to stop links from being entered, here's another gem I discovered quite a while ago. I am using the PHP tag of STRISTR to kill off the Shoutbox whenever somebody posts stuff that just shouldn't be in messages. This makes me sure that those who want to do bad, will see a white screen right after hitting the Send button. Currently it's working quite well because I haven't had spam since renewing my shoutbox and implementing this gem while beforehand I had about 30 to 50 spam messages per day!

Here's an example of some of the items that will kill off the shoutbox. I don't post everything in this list, but it tells you how to avoid most of the spam. Of course you can guess the rest, including capital letters or disallowed (X)HTML/BBCode tags.

I have also created a mobile version that only shows text and the already inserted emoticons on the main Shoutbox. Shavatars and Text make-ups aren't in there and won't be in there for the plain simple reason: I want to keep the Mobile Shoutbox to follow the guidelines of Mobile Site design. Fun thing with this is that I've implemented, after learning the simplest of tricks, to post the location of the poster as well.

Well, that was it. Have fun and except this to become Open Source once I'm ready to deliver a more improved version! So far I don't count on any person visiting the shoutbox, hence I'll use it every now and then to write personal memo's.

PS: Did I mention I am keeping all this XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS Level 1? This is the standard I am focusing on to make sure I can reach everybody and every browser on any kind of OS out there.