As you quite likely noticed...

I've been fiddling with the sidebar today.

I took out the "social links" as they didn't get much use and were annoyingly slow to load.

I scripted up a little, for lack of a better term, shoutbox. It's basically just a chatroom for visitors to the site. The main thing it brings over the forums is realtime updates. So if you say something and someone else has a page up, it'll get updated with what you said. Thus, allowing you to chat. It also folds in any tweets sent to @animemikomiorg, so if you're a twitter type of person, that's available too. It'll show the 10 most recent posts of whatever kind.

And finally, I moved the Current Favorites up to the top, just below the shout box, as it seems more useful to me then the automatically generated stuff.

That's also what all the bogus forum updates were about there. =p I've fixed it so that the What's New will no longer show shout box posts.

Oh, and its actually all implemented as a single forum thread, so if you ever need to see the archive of all shout box posts, it's here. This page will also give you the opportunity to edit your shouts, should you need to, though that won't be reflected in realtime to others.

Edit: As Devil Doll points out, Current Favorites is getting styled different for some reason. I'll look into that. Xenoknight discovered that if things time just wrong it's possible to see a post show up more then once. I'll fix that, I was just being lazy.

Note: Xenoknight would like to see the Facebook social link added back. And I'd like to add Twitter back myself. If anyone else has a use for any others, post here and I'd be happy to add them.

Note: Reminder to self, fix the existing mini-icons (on series and the like) to have a margin.

Edited on 06/13/2010 06:31 PM.

Some other random technical notes:

Currently this is implemented as polling. It checks for new chat messages every 5 seconds and new twitter messages every 45 seconds.

Twitter messages are cached, so the server itself will only talk to Twitter once every 45 seconds.

In the future I'll likely change the chat system to use long-polling. Twitter will likely stay as it is, unless it starts to see heavy use. I may make chat posts echo to twitter so that two way conversations are possible.

Edited on 06/13/2010 06:32 PM.

The shout box is implemented as forum thread... would it make sense to place the link to that thread somewhere near the shout box form? (Such as on the title "Shout Box" or on some small widget next to it, with a tooltip explaining where this will lead you.)

Probably, but I think I need to add a pager to the forums before I do that. =p