Finally, after weeks of procrastination, I’m happy to announce major changes over on The Connections Project: contributors can now register and login, which means that due credit will now be given 
I put off setting up login/register support because I was kind of dreading it. Having never programmed that from scratch over the HTTP protocol, I was expecting the worst, nightmares of manually encoding cookies ran through my head. Turns out PHP makes the process very easy with their $_SESSION variables. PHP seems like a 22nd century language sent from the future to turn the 21st into a programmer’s utopia 
The only major new feature left to add at Connections is text-parsing. Right now, connections and theme descriptions are just raw text, with no way for users to insert hyperlinks, images, etc. One solution would be to add support for BBCode, as seen on all the major forum systems.
Speaking of forum systems, that’s the next major project I’ve got my eyes on for GFM. Oh, I’ve got so many ideas for cool new things to put online, it would be hard to list them all. But with coding, you’ve gotta focus on just one or two things at once or you’ll go crazy I’m thinking of, rather than using phpBB or vBulletin or any other common open-source forum software, I might just code up my own from scratch. With the experience I’ve gotten creating The Connections Project, a forum wouldn’t be much more difficult. I’ll have learned from some of my past mistakes and the forums should actually end up being easier than the previous Web2.0 app. Why would I go to all the effort of writing my own forums from scratch, if phpBB is available for free? Cuz everyone and their dog has phpBB, a private forum implementation would really make this website glow, even more than it already does Besides that, I’d have a much more intimate level of control than I would with open-source forums. With WordPress (itself a gigantic open-source PHP/SQL script), I feel slightly limited just because I don’t know all the dozens of .php files inside and out. Maybe one day, I’ll program my own blog software from scratch and transfer the GFM articles there… but now I’m getting way ahead of myself. Gotta keep focused on immediate projects…
I’m a little disappointed in the lack of activity at Connections so far, but then, it’s only been up a month and I’ve hardly marketed it at all. Probably I won’t start actively “selling” it outside my own blog until I get the text parsing nailed down. There’s no rush though. Low volunteerism notwithstanding, the project is already attracting nice organic traffic from the search engines, because even just the one debut theme already provides information in a distinct flavor which isn’t available anywhere else My hope is that in the years to come, Connections will grow exponentially to provide value in around the same order of magnitude as Wikipedia.
If you’re a webmaster, I highly recommend you teach yourself PHP and some version of SQL. If you don’t have a host which lets you play with these things, get one… I put it off forever (the excuse of the hosting price seems so silly now that Xamuel.com is paying for itself many times over), and I’m kicking myself that I was letting myself be caged in the Blogspot kiddie-pool for so long!
Making an account at The Connections Project is free and easy. Any page there now has a “login/register” on the upper right. Feel free to make an account even if you aren’t planning on contributing any content. All are welcome
FURTHER READING
My Experience with Programming
Moving from Blogspot to WordPress
The Lands of Aethar