A Broader Emotional Blogging Range

After spending several weeks posting status updates to the site that include my mood, I decided that I needed to begin using a broader vocabulary to describe my emotional state. Aside from producing a boringly repetative pattern, I simply felt that my range of emotion encompassed more than I was taking the time to specify.

How best to make this process easier to facilitate?

LiveJournal has a rather large array of emotions to choose from when posting content. The list is large enough that I felt it worth replicating, for convenience. After all, the end goal is to cross-post blog entries to my various profiles, including LiveJournal, so it only makes sense to use data that it is already trained to expect.

Keep reading to find out how I ended up implementing the feature...

Since the Articles publication type that I selected already has a "mood" field, I simply modified the template to place a new dropdown in front of the textfield and populated it with the LiveJournal mood options.

Next, I added Javascript to my field so that, every time it changed, the value selected would be duplicated to the textfield.

Now, I can select from one of the available moods scraped from LiveJournal or I can type in my own to use.

From here, I would like to begin sorting the available moods into general types (good moods vs bad moods vs neutral moods) and color code them in the dropdown for faster/easier selection.

Of course, that still leaves me without a LiveJournal API client to cross-post with, but we'll get there...