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Modern HTML and CSS practices, one of my hold ups has always been the fact that user comments support a rich version of HTML with plenty of deprecated tags, it is something of a war with the browser as the most appropriate doctype attribute (HTML 4 Transitional) is also deprecated and triggers intentional quirky browser behavior. One solution is to translate the tags such as FONT to CSS-style attributes but this is a bit complex when you dig into it (the CENTER tag is a thicket of complexity.) I’d love to support a minimal set of user CSS in postings, but this is also rife with complexity.

Rewriting the database to support edittable comments in a sane way is also very high on the list. In fact I have completely redesigned the database schema. This change alone is so massive that it warrants a ground-up rewrite of the software.

Some optional enhancement to the user interface, a bit more fluid when browser features are available. I’m a fan of something called progressive enhancement, meaning the site is designed without JavaScript, but when present, the user experience is far more rich. So many sites get JavaScript wrong IMHO. I hate JS (though it has come a long way I admit.) I don’t mean as a language, was even toying around with rewriting a great deal of the page generation code in server-side JS. I just hate executable code in an untrustworthy environment, people would be safer without it (and browser Java and Flash and ...)

I have a long list of things. NLP for keyword population and name recognition within articles, using meta tags from external sites to better index articles, some wiki-like features for long-lived topics, blogging, a way to reward well written user contributions, enhancement to our abilitity to affect activism (event coordination and other such campaigns), possibly a distributed database if ever the SHTF, possibly a browser add-on for FR comments in a sidebar on external sites, a bit of optimization for search engines, lots of little things.