Inside Blatherbox: From Code to Content
April 2, 2025
Besides gaming, my other passion is web development—something I've been doing for over 20 years as a hobby. Blatherbox is the first project where I've treated it like a professional product. I wanted to challenge myself, sharpen my skills, and build something from the ground up.
No templates. No WordPress. No drag-and-drop tools. Everything on the site is hand-coded—from user account management to article features. I've built a complete comment system, image carousels, polls, dark mode, and various profile options like interests (still in progress), profile likes, images, and support for alternate login methods like X, Facebook, Google, Apple, and more. In short, all the core features you'd expect from a modern, full-featured site.
A year in, I'm proud of how far it's come. Blatherbox has evolved into a more focused platform built around content that matters to me and, hopefully, to you.
For fun, I thought it would be nice to share what I have been working on and get an inside look at how I manage the site (something nobody sees).
Blatherbox Control Panel
The next puzzle piece is almost finished: a custom-built control panel to manage site content and features. Like the main site, I'm building it from scratch. The only third-party tools I use are Chart.js for traffic graphs and TinyMCE for article editing.
Blatherbox Dashboard
This dashboard tracks key visitor stats. It's not massive traffic yet—we're still growing—but it's a start. It shows total visitors, unique users, and return visits.
You'll see visual graphs for traffic over the last 24 hours and the past 30 days. There's also a breakdown of top pages by URL, title, and views (tracking for this just started recently). The last section logs recent visits with referrer info, page views per session, and IPs (blurred in the shared image).
Blatherbox Articles
The article control panel lists all published and draft articles. I added a search function that filters articles by title. For example, searching "Metroid" pulls up all articles related to Metroid, as shown in the image I shared.
There's a dedicated section for draft articles, where I can save work-in-progress pieces for publishing later. The article creation form is straightforward and includes TinyMCE for easier formatting (accessible via the "Edit ++" button). Since I'm using the free version of TinyMCE, which has a limit of 1,000 script loads every 30 days, I also built a basic form for quick edits when I don't need the full editor.
Because articles are the heart of the site, I wanted a way to manage them efficiently and add new ones on the go. I can store drafts when traveling or pressed for time—something I'll be doing this weekend during a trip to the East Coast.
Blatherbox Media
This section of the control panel manages the image carousels used in articles. I can create new carousels or edit existing ones from the main screen. After creating a carousel, I can manually upload images by dragging, dropping, or selecting them. Clicking an image opens it on the full screen, and I've added multi-file deletion for faster management.
Each carousel includes a snippet of code at the bottom of the page that I can easily copy and paste into articles. I plan to expand this section to support videos, which I'll tackle later as the control panel evolves.
Blatherbox Polls
Polls are managed similarly to image carousels. I can create a new poll and dynamically add as many options as needed. There's also a list of existing polls, which display real-time results when clicked—like the example shown with the Super Mario Bros. 3 poll.
Once a poll is created, I can edit it, add more options, and copy the embed code to insert it into articles. I need to add a feature to remove options dynamically, but that's on the roadmap.
Other Sections
I've also built sections to manage users and site settings. I plan to expand the control panel further to include comment moderation and other features. The backend is coming together, which has made running the site much more manageable.
This is just the beginning for Blatherbox. I'm excited to keep building and improving the experience—for visitors and myself.
If you have suggestions or feedback, I'd love to hear it. Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate any participation on the site!