JokesHive.com - new look and feel, an all new refreshing look

It's four months since I updated the www.jokeshive.com last. Although there has been no updates on the application, I have been working on the new version albeit slow enough to take 4 long months. Here are the highlights of the upcoming release -

1. Revamped Home Page with new color scheme. Earlier it was too bluish.
   
   JokesHive.com: Old Home Page
   
   
   
   JokesHive.com: New Home Page
   
   
2. Got rid of jQuery tabs. They were not easily manipulable. I was having problem enabling/ disabling the jQuery tabs based on user login.
3. Introduced “Menu” on the top bar. It was probably obvious evolution once I got rid of the tabs. But was not eye-catchy. I had a fear that user may miss the 'Joke Box' and 'Crack a Joke' links in a big way.
4. Hence came two big click-able image icons – one for 'Crack a Joke', second one for 'Joke Box'.
5. Revamped the footer look and feel & added content to the urls that includes making this blog available as one of the links.
6. Changed the data-type of the Joke Content to GAE - “Text” type. This would allow JokesHive to allow big format jokes which seems to more popular on western hemisphere. However, it is not yet supported, need to work on UI changes to accommodate this.
7. Introduced 'show more' link on the scrolling pane on the home page.
8. Started using qtip2 (http://craigsworks.com/projects/qtip2/) for UI tooltips.
9. Changed the color scheme of the mobile app.
10. Refactored the codebase of make them more modularized.
    
    I guess I still need some more time to tie few loose ends.

What's in this release?

Here is a quick list. Will put more meat to it if possible.

1. On page refresh, tabs are reset to Tab-1
2. An unruly Send Button will not push the next joke down any more.
3. On Crack A Joke Page, 400 Character limit is put with twitter style real time update.
4. Once a joke is submitted the text & other selections will be reset.
5. Fixed the Bug with 'City of Residence' & 'Country of Residence'
6. Started showing Author City on home page in the scrolling bar.
7. Fixed two bugs that come when chopping off a Joke content beyond 100 chars for tweet purpose.
8. Fixed the broken Facebook App, now it displays all jokes shared to everyone. The logic here would be changed to restrict the viewing of the jokes share by "me & my friends" only.
9. Unlike JokesHive.com, Facebook app will have limited functionalities where only one tab will be there and no comment/edit/re-crack options are available.

Javascript & JQuery

I don't know lot of other javascript libraries, but from whatever I have seen, JQuery seems to be the way to go when it comes to interactive rich web development. Of course needless to say Google comes very handy for people like me to identify "the right choice" while learning in an unstructured way. Yesterday I received a feedback from one of the early users of JokesHive.com and a friend of mine that Joke Submission field doesn't have a check on size on UI level while it doesn't support large text content in the DB level. This was one the items to be done where I want to limit the size to 400 characters. This helps to stick to data type 'String' which has a limitation of 500 character on Google App Engine (GAE) and to have a uniform look on the UI by fixing the height of the display area. However, increasingly I have a realization that people from Western world and US of A in particular enjoy jokes that are pretty large, at times almost a page length.

For now, I will limit the length of the text to 400 Chars and use Twitter like countdown indicator.
I will the JQuery plugin from - http://www.andymatthews.net/code/textCounter/

Hope the users of JokesHive.com appreciate this improvement.

Genesis of Jokeshive.com

I intend to keep this as a technical blog, blogging my experiences as I develop http://www.jokeshive.com. Intention is to help me remember some of the implementations in future (I have one of the worst possible memories in the world) and hopefully some of the fellow developers would be benefited through the inputs and findings that I share here. However, before I delve into the details of technical implementation, I would like to give a little brief about what got me started and what motivated me to get going.
I guess it all got started when my friend Subrata and my brother in law Abhisekda started sending jokes over sms. I realized how much more enjoyable my days had become while I kept reading those jokes. There were occasions when I got up in the middle of the night and looked for a new joke. I did one more thing to have my supply lines keep going. I started forwarding jokes from one to other, after all it works as a barter system:).

Patterns that I noticed -

I like jokes and so do others
SMSs gives a very quick and easy access .
It survives on the basis of forwarding the jokes to each other.
Typically you forward the jokes you like most and so do your friends.
Friends share similar tastes. ( too obvious to observe ;))
Hence average quality is much better.
I need more such friends who can share more jokes of their choice.

If we add the dots and do a bit of extrapolation in this age of Facebook what does that tell us? A Social Network dedicated to Jokes. Is it not too obvious? Yes it is.

But Facebook did not come natural to me either. I started looking into Facebook seriously through its APIs first (what an Irony) when my friend Arindam sought some technical help & gradually fell in love with "Facebook". Till that point I was rather sarcastic about all these hoopla around social network.

17-March-2011 I registered my app with google appengine, created the first app from the examples which finally became jokeshive.com. In fact, I continue to maintain the name of the ecplise project as "Guestbook".

So that's all about how Jokes Hive was born.