As an untypical mixture of web, wiki, blog and forum, haic was created for my group of friends as our common internet refuge. During its times, it was a popular place and tool to organize events, post stuff of all variations, share homework or lead hot discussion wars. The site is nowadays largely unattended.

Blog + Forum

The idea was that you post a thing and then you have a discussion about it, which was rendered on a separate page. Content was categorised into roughly 6 areas of interests, with the last one (named Curryozities) acting as sort-of-a-bin for posts that were hard to pigeon-hole. One of the hallmarks is the large crazy "control panel" at the top of the page, which allowed you to select content (something that tags do these days).

Implementation

The system was hand-coded from scratch in PHP4 and interestingly, though it used MySQL, information was predominantly stored in numbered text files, which is somewhat quirky as would use of punch cards nowadays be. This meant that threaded discussions were not possible, but this didn't pose a problem as we all preferred the chat-like interface. The control panel took almost a week to complete, due to the large number of graphical elements involved and uncomfortable construction using HTML tables (too lazy to learn how to CSS that, I guess). Discussions were implemented using 2 pages: one that viewed them and allowed the user to contribute, other listing them according to their "hotness" (indicated by the "hotness-meter"). The site was completed in 4 weeks and featured:

• (Fixed) content categorisation and selection
• user account creation and management
• WYSIWIG editor for posts (using HTMLAREA)
• simple search
• favourites
• co-authoring (somewhat a wiki-like feature)

Only basic security measures were added, mainly to prevent SQL injection and evil friends from deleting or editing posts they didn't write. Passwords were stored uncrypted, because they were often forgotten. In discussions, it was possible to "blow" the page by inserting wilful HTML code, a prank often did by HTML-aware users or by me, when I wanted to "shout" at debaters.

What's behind the name?

HAIC comes from my first name, suffixed by a "C" which used to denote "Company". Later, it was lower-cased to "haic", becoming a buzzword for the site. Nowadays, it is a synonym for a forgotten era...

Cold future

haic.wz.cz is no longer maintained and the amount of visits per month could be counted by a pre-school child. A complete upgrade and recode has been planned during summer 2006 (view design here), but due to the falling interest the pages were left to rot forever in the crowded history of web pages.