Great words

The story of GreatWords.ru  - a site where you can find and write smart words from books, brief ingenious sentences - began with my simple phrase: “I have long wanted to create a site where I will record all quotes. I read a lot of books ... everything that I write out is lost. ” Together with Evgeny Getmanenko, we implemented the idea of ​​a site with wise words, which I want to briefly talk about.



The site is small in structure. You can reach any page in no more than 3 clicks. After the first layouts, it became clear that we needed a couple of clouds and a search to find something to read. The size of the cloud element non-linearly depends on the number of citations attached to it, which allows the "giants" to grow with deceleration. And they say that mathematics in the eleventh grade is needed only for admission to universities :-).







At first, we did not expect the site to be fully implemented without a single page reload, using Ajax. But over time, they decided to do so by duplicating support for most pages in case JavaScript was turned off (Eugene wished to be able to record quotes from a mobile phone) and for search engines. The adoption of the player, the most successful concept here for the transition between quotes, pushed us to this. Following this concept, a list of quotes by author or label looks like a playlist. You can select any quote from the list and read it, as well as use the buttons “Previous quote” and “Next quote”. But most importantly - the ability to play. By adjusting the reading speed for yourself and pressing the play button, you can sit back and enjoy great words - quotes will change automatically at the speed you set. And this is just an option; when it is not needed - it is not an eyesore.



Somehow I thought: if, during the work of a regular desktop application, after each action, the form would start blinking and reloading, how would it be perceived :-)? Modern web applications should not be inferior to application software. When loading the next page, the previous one does not disappear and does not blink. An animated download icon appears at the bottom right, the mouse cursor changes to an hourglass. I believe that the sites of the future will be just that. Registered users have their own advantages: firstly, they retain speed. Secondly, they can maintain a list of selected quotes. Thirdly, everything that they add is also available as a separate playlist. For guests these functions, for obvious reasons, are not available. Otherwise, their capabilities are the same.





We can improve the search when we go to our hosting. Now colocalized for us is not available what is necessary for this, and a dedicated server is not available for financial reasons. Search engines will not get confused on our site, we have made efforts for this, so you can search with their help.

Any visitor can add a quote. We check and edit all added quotes, arrange synonyms with existing tags and authors. Synonymy is needed to avoid duplicates and similar words - for example, we always make different numerical forms of a word synonymous. For the label, quotes with synonymous labels of this one are also displayed. The same thing with the authors, since there are different options for writing the name of one person. We reserve the right to reject a quote if it is boring, is already on the site, or if the author is not specified (even in a broad sense, such as “Ancient Egyptians”).

A bit about the technical side: when writing the backend, not a single php framework was used (yes, the site is made in php), the code is completely written from scratch. When writing the frontend, js frameworks were also not used, all js was written manually, but the JsHttpRequest library was used. The site is made according to the XHTML standards. By the way, there is one technical limitation: we do not guarantee the correct operation of the site in Internet Explorer 6. The reason is simple - it absolutely does not support modern technologies.

Add-ons

1. At the request of many users, a version with a white background and black font will appear, as an alternative to the existing one.
2. After a short habraeffect, the site works again.
3. Thanks to everyone for the high ratings of the topic, thanks to them I can now give an inviteEvgeny Getmanenko , with whom we did this project.
4. Also thanks for the comments here and for the letters with comments and suggestions.
5. Well, thanks for your activity. Physically I do not have time to approve all the quotes :) But you can be sure that if the quote is adequate, it will certainly appear on the site.