The story of the ShoutBox I made might be a good thing for the news...

(Please note: This ShoutBox is not to be confused with DSiCade's Shout Box. The two are not the same, and the script from mine is 100% original and created entirely by me. Please do not flame me about copyright crap in this blog.
Thanks)

The ShoutBox originally started as an idea to submit brief announcements to the bystanders of the home page.
I made a simple table on the database for these announcements shortly after the guestbook was created, but shortly before the Books were made. The table was a simple 2-columned table, enough to hold an announcement id and the announcement itself.
A section for usernames and a timestamp was not necessary, since these were only short announcements made by only me.

For a few months, the idea only collected dust. Until shortly after I added the Latest News to the home page after Thanksgiving Day.
I stumbled upon my announcement table in the database, and I had another idea in store for it, as a result of the recent Guestbook conversations at that time.
So I added a few more columns; one for a timestamp, one to carry a username, and another to carry an Active status (for deleting).

Thus, the ShoutBox was born!

Known as "Shouts" at the time, they were visible on the home page, only showing one shout at a time. Because of this limit, an archive was added to manage shouts.
Colors for the text were added that day to personalize the Shouts. Basically, they were all the colors of the rainbow in order, with black as the default color. at the time, radio buttons were used to select colors.
Since admins were introduced just shortly before the Shouts were, I have added the first admin control (other than deleting); the Alert.

For a few weeks, the Alert was a control only I could see. But it was released into the admin public eventually.
Alerts were like Shouts, Only the default (and only available) color was red, and the name was hidden and replaced with "Alert says:". They were made by simply selecting a checkbox labeled "Alert" that only Shout admins could see.

For a few months, the shouts stayed in this style, until the Ajax age came to my site.

The Shouts were the first things on my site to support Ajax. It took almost two weeks of down time for the shouts. And after finding the last error (a capital "C" in the script), Ajax was successfully added onto the shouts, with a timeout session added shortly afterwards.

Because of complications with JavaScript having a hard time finding the color that was selected with radio buttons, a drop box was replaced for selecting colors. Not only it was easier to recognize, it was more organized.


An "anchor" option was added to the color selector, since the HTML sweep does not allow the <a> tag to be functional. So to make a link, you would type the proper URL, including "http://" (otherwise, it would appear as a normal shout), and select "Anchor" in the color selector, and hit the button, and there you have a link.
That same day, little red X's were added to make deleting simpler.
That was also the time when the Shouts became the ShoutBox, due to the increased number of shouts shown on the home page. There were 3 at the time.
I moved the number up to the last 10 shouts after I put an overflow div around the ShoutBox.

Now the most recent update, and the best one yet, the update that makes the ShoutBox even smarter, updating the table to store the Member's ID, rather than name. So any changes to the username could be updated to shouts made in the past.
But since that was a major change, all the shouts before that update had to be deleted from the table.
Also as a result of this update, the shout archive has become not only obsolete, but also un-functionalble and completely useless, and has been removed.


Future updates... I plan to turn the ShoutBox into an admin command prompt as well, thereby making bans possible, and admins would be easier to make (for me).

To think... this now being my greatest application, with all that complex coding, and all that sweat, when it first started as a simple shout on the home page... It was derived from a dead idea...

There is a moral that this experience has taught me, and I hope will teach you...
Sometimes your greatest achievement can be born from a dead idea...

Thanks for reading.
Have a nice day!