Home
A complete, evolving documentation of the Scream experimental micro‑blogging platform. This wiki covers the project vision, technical design, prototypes, architecture, challenges, experiments, and development notes.
Scream is a text‑first, minimal social platform built with PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS. It is intentionally designed to escape the modern noise of video-driven platforms and return to simplicity — words, thoughts, and expression.
The project also serves as a full‑stack learning experiment for SQL, backend logic, frontend structure, UI/UX decisions, and system design.
- Free expression (“screaming your thoughts”).
- Minimal, calm UI (white/gray surfaces + signature blue navbar).
- No videos; only text + optional images.
- Lightweight, inspectable, easy to self-host.
- Backend-first learning architecture.
Scream explores what happens when people are given a space with fewer filters — where words, not media hype, carry the message.
Modern social platforms are dominated by videos, AI‑generated media, and overstimulation. Scream is an intentional retreat, where users can write without pressure.
A scream is:
- A release
- A voice
- A raw expression
Every post is called a Scream, similar to how tweets exist on Twitter.
The project went through several design experiments.
- Yellow-based background.
- Minimalist but lacked conceptual clarity.
- Rejected for not aligning with modern UI patterns.
- A signature blue top navigation bar (symbol of trust, clarity, and social media tradition).
- White/gray minimal background.
- Clean “Japanese-style minimalism.”
Prototype 1.2
More prototypes will be documented in future sections.
- Create user accounts
- Login + session management
- Post text content (“Screams”)
- Like, unlike, comment, reply
- Soft deletion of posts and comments
- Basic moderation + reporting
- Must support at least 1,000 users initially
- Must be performant on shared-hosting environments
- DB-driven architecture, no modern frameworks
- All interactions must be fast (< 300ms ideally)
- UI must remain minimal
Current tables completed:
tbl_userstbl_poststbl_comments
Future tables:
tbl_likestbl_viewstbl_reportstbl_sessions
ERD and schema diagrams will be added.
- Signup page
- Signup action page
- Login page
- Login action page
- Minimal index feed UI (HTML/CSS)
- Comment table definition
- PHP backend integration
- Session handling across pages
- Feed rendering dynamically
- Separation of action pages (like POST, LIKE, COMMENT) vs single controller file.
- Scaling challenges with procedural PHP.
- File structure modularity.
As the platform grows:
- Every feature (post, like, comment, edit, delete, view tracking) requires its own PHP action file.
- The project risks turning into a maze of scattered endpoints.
- Hard to maintain, debug, or scale.
This is a major architectural challenge.
The solution is not documented here, only noted.
A dedicated section will store all prototype images, early designs, and rejected concepts. This helps track the evolution of Scream.
- Add more backend structure
- Introduce template components
- Implement real-time refresh using lightweight methods
- Add user notifications
- Improve feed ranking
- Alwin Madhu (Project Owner) — alwinmadhu4060@gmail.com
If you want, I can expand this wiki into multiple separate pages — such as SRS, UML diagrams, Architecture, API Docs, DB Docs, UI/UX, Prototypes, and more.