My back hurts, sleep has been out of the picture, and I've already begun to wear the paint off of the keys on my new MacBook Pro. For what? Umm, duh...the grand 'beta' release of the Story section of the site. I've been hard at work, about 20 hours of it to be specific, trying to fiddle the right bits of code together to produce the 3rd of 4 sections of the website. I began this fine creation by porting the same code I used for the Blog section. While that worked to get things started, after reviewing my code for that section, there was some serious re-factoring that needed to be done for both sections. A few hundred lines of code later, not to mention a number of words that would make a priest cry grimace, it's up and running.

A few friends of mine have asked me the same question. What's the difference between blogs and stories? Well, for me, the major difference is the the type of information you are trying to communicate.

1. Blogs – Short, sweet, and to the point, blogs aren't meant to convey long, drawn out stories that are rich with images. In fact, pictures aren't even necessary with blogs. Want to complain about Sienna Miller's comment about Pittsburgh, blog about it. Some typical examples would include what you are reading now. It's just a quick 'diary' entry of me talking about a new section of the site.
2. Stories – These entries tend to be longer in nature and can be used to summarize something like an event in your life (e.g, vacation, night out on the town, etc). They typically contain a handful of images from the occasion and the story interface itself is designed to be more friendly for these images by providing a slideshow feature.

• Image captions – You can set a caption for each image in your story. These are also transformed into 'alt' tags, in case you were wondering.
• Primary story image – For the visually inclined, you can upload endless numbers of images and select one of them to server as your main story image which shows on the homepage.
• Inline image editing – While editing your story, you can edit various attributes of the image itself without even having to reload the page. Yay for AJAX and RJS for making our lives easier. You can modify the image's caption, choose if it should be included in the slideshow, and even change which picture you want to use for the main image. After you are done making your changes, you just click 'Save' and poof, updates are made instantaneously.
• Image slideshows – Rather than just click on an image and view it, I've used the Lightbox javascript package to enable a slideshow feature. You click on an image and the slideshow loads allowing you to navigate through each image in the slideshow.
• Image downloads – I don't know about you, but I get annoyed when I have to click on an image, view it in a new window, and then right-click...you get the point. Let's simplify it, you can now click the download link and it automatically downloads to your desktop with most browsers. Others will ask you to save it, but that's still less steps.
• Story moderation and management – To avoid allowing unwanted content, or perhaps bugs in my coding practices, from creeping into the look and feel of the site, I've implemented moderation for stories. When you 'publish' the blog, it's submitted for approval by the 'moderator', me. I will receive an email notifying me of a new story to review and then I can choose to approve, reject, view, or delete the story altogether. It doesn't stop there, if I decide to reject or delete the story, I can even include a small message indicating why. I know, I know, doesn't matter much to you, but I just had to include it for fun.

What's next? The media section. Before I get to that, I plan on writing about 100 or so tests to make sure everything on the story section is functioning to specification. Wait, I'm kidding, there is no specification, but I do need to write some more tests. Adios for now.