I've been working on this for a while. I realize it's not finished yet, but I got tired of the old one, so I have released it despite the kinks. Please leave your feedback, but know that I may not be timely in making changes.

Also, you can test out your own changes by various means. Firebug, obviously. Or try the CSS box on your profile page. Finally, you could clone Vortices and edit the AppJet code.

Vortices is a multipurpose social network. It fulfills functions such as:

• keeping up with friends
• finding news
• interesting discussion
• blogging
• taking notes
• saving bookmarks

Vortices is a threaded forum, meaning that you can directly reply to any message. A headline will typically link to an external site.

To post, you need to register an account. All it takes is a unique user name and a password.

You can of course add more information to your profile later.

Posting

Once you are signed in, you'll see a text input and a post button. This is for short messages. Click "Text" for longer updates. If you use the link or the text fields, then the default field becomes the headline.

Formatting

You can use HTML or Markdown to format your posts. Vortices will automatically convert URLs of images, MP3s, and YouTube videos to content after you post, but this may conflict with HTML and Markdown, in which case you should edit your post and add html as a tag, which will turn off the automatic conversion. Two line breaks are needed to make a new paragraph. Here are some examples of Markdown syntax:

*italics*
**bold**
[link text](http://example.com)

- list item 1
- list item 2
- list item 3    
    - sub-item 1
    - sub-item 2

> quoted text

    code block (indent 4 spaces)

`code snippet

# heading 1
## heading 2
(up to 6 levels)

Voting

If you've signed in, you'll notice plus and minus buttons to the left of every post and reply. These are for voting. You may undo or reverse your vote as many times as you'd like. The sum of all votes becomes the number of points that an item. Note that any post you make automatically receives your vote.

Why vote?

Votes affects how prominent a post is. When you first make a post, it will immediately appear at the top of the front page. This is due to the sorting algorithm dubbed "Hot". It is simply points squared over age. So something with nearly 0 age and one point has a near infinite "temperature" value, thus being the hottest thing around. The interesting thing about time is that it eventually evens out. While age may be a large handicap in the temperature of a day old post verses a brand new post, a week from now the now 7-day-old post will barely have an advantage over the now 8-day-old post. Then it will be their scores that really matter. While not too many older posts will be found on the front page, the Hot sorting algorithm affects reply threads and other pages as well.

Sorting

There are other ways to sort things as well. You can find them in the menu. Keep in mind that the last sorting method you selected will be used on all pages. This can have some quirky results, such as going from the 3rd Hot page to the 3rd New page.

Why did you make Vortices?

Originally, I intended to make a Facebook or MySpace clone, but I became enamored with Digg and later Reddit, so I decided that social news was a higher form. At its heart, Vortices is a Reddit clone that took me about a week and a half to program. But it only truly shone after months of tweaking. As new sites come along, I copy some of their features as well.

Click the images to expand them to full size. Note that this only saves screen space and not download time.

This is my solution to avatars.

1. Sign up for a gravatar.
2. Add your email address to your Vortices profile.

It looks very nice, much easier to follow.

One issue so far: sign-in box does not go away. And the buttons cover the category titles.

So 2 issues I guess.

I took out the user account system and put it into a separate library. Then I fixed it up and made it more secure. Since the passwords are encrypted in a different way, returning users are unable to sign in. If you would like to use your old account, please email me and I can help restore it.

This is just an experiment. Please continue to post on Vortices proper. What's cool is that on non-AppJet servers you can run Java functions, which can do all sorts of things, such as image manipulation.

L'excessive by Carla Bruni

Testing out automatic image, audio, and video embedding in the presence of URLs. This is yet another way that Vortices is shaving seconds off your online experience to make better communication possible.

It has unwanted consequences if you use Markdown or HTML, as you can see in older posts. More regexes could solve this, but for now you can opt out of auto embedding and markdown formatting by tagging your post with the keyword html.

Right now, every post or reply has an author property. What if it were just a hard coded tag? Then there could easily be multiple authors, because instead of just having a tag, author:Fred, it would also have author:John.

This is the coolest feature ever.

The tagging system replaces categories. Just click "Tags" at the bottom of the posting form and type a comma-separated list of words that would make it easier to find your post later.

Now I will see about individual and category feeds.

What a relief!

There was a problem with edits not going through if there were empty fields, and it seems as though that has been fixed.

Well, I have a very rudimentary category system now. Plus any post can be a wiki. I want to make nested categories, though, and an easier way to pick the category. Right now, you just type in the category you want, and the category only appears if you add it separately.

To add a category:

1. Start a new post.
2. Put the name of your category in the "title" field.
3. Put "category" (no quotes) in the "category" field. Make sure it is spelled right and in all lower case.