It took me longer than foreseen, but after a couple of different approaches there is a final alpha version of my fan-tas-tic project. Although still in a alpha stage, I think a soft launch with this post is a logical move prior to a beta version: behold FAN-TAS-TIC! User Generated Galleries.

WTF is FTT!
FTT! is actually designed and developed as a pure personal project: a fantastic image gallery, with ‘fantastic’ covering the genres science-fiction, (heroic) fantasy/sword & sorcery, gothic, horror, anime and the quality of the art self displayed at the gallery.

So…yet another gallery?
Supervisually yes…it’s nothing more than just another gallery.

However some of the features what should make FTT! really unique compared to other galleries are:
Banner blindness prove:

• All sponsor/ad banners are blended in the design, so the users are ‘bothered’ as little as possible
• The banner spots are randomly generated to minimize the ‘blindness’ effect
• Also the single post banner is very visible, yet blended

Quality of the content:

• Advanced user submission form (to be moderated by admin for ‘quality control’)
• Only fan-tas-tic images are approved; no doodles here!
• All images are categorized, tagged and archived and are available via the statistics
• All uploads have (if available) a link to the original author and gallery and/or the source of the image

User friendly UI:

• Any image can be rated (and is automatically ranked)
• Also the less rated and low rated images are highlighted (randomly or via related posts)
• Different kind of archives are present: monthly, yearly, per category or per uploader/submitter
• Most and least rated post are relative to the current tag, category of the single post
• Simple navigation (sub)menu’s showing all submenu
• Statistics: Overview of the last rated images and the highest, lowest, most and least rated images

I’ve also left some additional features out, which were time consuming to implement…maybe they’ll make it in the next version

Still to do…
Although I need to work some details out and have to do a lot of code cleaning and optimization and the GUI is somewhat Spartan, the site is live and is ready to be (alpha-)tested.

Feedback?
Any constructive feedback for this alpha-version is welcome in the comments below…

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It’s being overhyped. Over-hyped. Uber-hyped.

If you still haven’t checked out the trailer, do it now:

And? Impressed? Underwhelmed? Overwhelmed? Also in HDplus? And would you be impressed on the big screen?
And the characters/aliens? Aren’t they just…average? If you’ve seen some good video games cinematics (lately), you possibly can’t be overwhelmed.

At the moment I’m very underwhelmed.
Although the story/plot of the movie, the big (3D) screen and actual dialogues may safe the movie when actually released.
It will probably make good money at the box-office and it may end up as a great movie after all…but at this time it’s just like I’m looking at a less clumsy blue version of Jar Jar Binks.

PS: the Avatar concept is a very cool idea and is ‘borrowed’ from a magnificent short story by my all-time favourite author Jack Vance, Phalid’s Fate.

And how about you? Are you impressed with (the Special Effects of the) teaser of this 200+ million dollars and 10 years in the making movie, which should ‘redefine’ the genre and ‘make real actors obsolete’?

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I’ve been busy working out some new concepts/blogs. Therefore I’m kinda struggling to get the new version of timbthumb to work. WIthout any succes yet.

Another thing what keeps me bugging: after having watched a (good) movie, I feel the urge to rant/rave about it. Although I know the internets full of rants and raves about any movie I can think of.
But I feel a movieblog coming up anyway…I’ve gotta get this out of ma system.
And I want to keep this blog purely development/design and blog related. Although the sidebar is a great spot for a lifestream of the other blogposts.

And also other ideas/blogs keep crawling in my head, so I decided to do some research how to manage multple blogs centrally.
I’ve decided to keep them al separate after all. Because for the central admin options they all need to be on the same domain.

Hope to have some real results and a ‘real’ blogpost very soon
Probably about other blogs!

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The TDO Mini Forms Wordpress Plugin is simply one of these plugins you’ll end up using, when you’ll be using WordPress for more than ‘just another blog’.

For my upcoming project I was looking for a fully customizable end user form and after having tried a bunch, TDO mini forms was simply the best.
I still don’t understand why it is called ‘mini’ because it has a ton of options and almost all of them very usefull.

The only issue I got with it was with the file/image upload widget: It was putting the uploaded files in wp-content/uploads/subfolder where I wanted them in wp-content/uploads/year/month.

Although there are usefull hints in the support forum, they wont get you there exactly. So here is the hack to solve this issue:
In the plugins folder replace line 552 (up until the line “// store info about files on post”) in file tdomf-upload-functions.php from this
[code lang="php"]
$postdir = $options['path'].DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$post_ID;
[/code]
to this
[code lang="php"]
$yearID=date("Y");
$monthID=date("m");

$postdir = $options['path'].$yearID.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$monthID;
$postdir2 = $options['url'].$yearID."/".$monthID;

tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
tdomf_recursive_mkdir($postdir2,TDOMF_UPLOAD_PERMS);
$newpath = $postdir.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];
$newpath2 = $postdir2.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.$theirfiles[$i]['name'];

if(rename($theirfiles[$i]['path'], $newpath)) {

$newpath = realpath($newpath);
$newpath2 = realpath($newpath2);
[/code]
Note that a variable 2 is added, just after the original.
Also note, that I’ve replaced the variable DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR in $postdir2 into “/”, cause it was giving me headaches.

In line 564 in the same file add just beneath this line
[code lang="php"]
add_post_meta($post_ID,TDOMF_KEY_DOWNLOAD_PATH.$i, $wpdb->escape($newpath),true);
[/code]
the following
[code lang="php"]
add_post_meta($post_ID,ftt_path,$postdir2,true);
[/code]
Make sure you do use $postdir2 here again. Will be using ftt_path to retrieve the stored URL, so remember what name you give it here.

And now we’ll be calling the uploaded files via the URL like this
[code lang="php"]
get_post_meta($post->ID, "ftt_path",true);
[/code]
instead of this, which will give you only the absolute path
[code lang="php"]
get_post_meta($post->ID, "_tdomf_download_name_0",true);
[/code]

This way it’s not even necessary to check ‘Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders’ at your Miscellaneous Settings.

Hope this helps others out also. If you have any other issues with TDO Mini forms, please refer to the original support form.

UPGRADE warnings

Remember that automatically upgrading the plugin to the newest version will overwrite the hacks above…so make sure to actually backup before you upgrade!

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Like many I’m also fed up with Microsoft software in general and Windows in particular. But like many I too am too lazy to make THE CHANGE to another BETTER OS.
Until now!

Why make the switch?

The last couple of years I’m preferring Open Source alternatives for almost every software. And it’s a true eye opener. And today I’ve made the bold move to do this with my OS also!
Yesterday my 6 year old Windows XP desktop (almost) stopped working: it’s so slow now, that it takes tens of minutes to start any application.
Thus a great opportunity to try out Ubuntu 9.04.

Also just recently my nephews Windows crashed (again)! And while he and I both have a registered and licensed legal Windows versions installed on the computer, the CD’s we’ve got are only recovery versions! And because he already had formatted his drive he could not use his legal CD anymore!
This made me realize how ridiculous this situation is…not Microsoft, but the computer manufacturers are here to blame…I know!
And he also made the switch…although he’s not that tech savy!

Will everything work? Out of the box?

And I’m very pleased I have made the switch. And I’m actually writing this post on my Ubuntu desktop now!
I was afraid I had to search, find and install drivers for my video card, sound card and the ethernet/network card…but it all worked out of the box!
And because Windows made me a coward I’ve also installed the Linux version of the superior viruskiller Avast. Although I’ve read I don’t realy need to…

What have I got now?

A good looking, great performing, FREE OS with some free software already installed like GIMP (alternative for PhotoShop) and Open Office (alternative for the Microsoft Office)!

What’s next?

Because I have still gigabytes of software to sort out and clean up on my VAIO laptop which I’m also working on my upcoming projects from I will not switch to Ubuntu on that…yet.
But I will soon.

And everyone should make the switch also…now!

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As stated above why not try the default URL of WordPress itself? As long as your own domain is not too long, why not give it a try? After having looked around in codex, the solution seemed very simple:
[code lang="php"]ID; ?>[/code]

For example http://www.fan-tas-tic.com/?p=200 is short enough without the disadvantages of a third party services and your own domain is indexed/searched in twitter and other tools. And you still keep your fancy permalinks. Win, win, win!

So looking for a short Url service for your Wordpress blog; why not use Wordpress itself?
Now isn’t this something to tweet about!?

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I should have known better than giving Windows the benefit of the doubt! I thought WAMP/WampServer screwed things up: suddenly I couldn’t connect to http://localhost anymore. Nor to phpMyAdmin, nor to MySQL.
And because I could connect to the internet, I figured it was my local server…and not a Windows Vista related issue.

However it seems Windows Update, Vista 32-bit, screwed the host-file and the localhost was only reachable via http://127.0.0.1.

Following the instructions from the Wampserver forum solved the issue:
Entering the line 127.0.0.1 localhost, just above the already existing line ::1 localhost.

To actually edit the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc you have the give your self the proper rights first:
You can do this by right-clicking on the hosts file, selecting properties and the tab Security and selecting Users and pressing the Edit button.
You might give yourself writing rights or full controll: Edit the file and put the original settings back, since you don’t know what Windows might crash next if you don’t!

Hope this helps others out of misery also…and I’m soo close switching OS, when I finish these projects and make enough money to buy me enough time!

PS: I’ve understood the same issue and solution is also applicable for XAMPP.

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Although the fan-tas-tic project is making good progress, I’m running to some issues which slows down the overall progress: This post is a short status update.

Issue 1: Internet Explorer still sucks.

Even version 7. And I have no high expectations for IE8, no matter how many tests it’ll pass.
I had to tweak a lot of CSS code just to make sure IE7 doesn’t screw up my layout, although it was fine enough in FF and Chrome.

A relief is that a bigger part (65%) of my visitors do use FF. An explanation for this is that the audience mostly consist of bloggers, designers and developers. They already know IE sucks.
However on my soccerforum IE is used by 53% of the visitors. This just confirms the theory about the audience of the sites. And because I’m expecting a mixed audience for Fan-tas-tic!, I dare not to neglect IE fully.

Issue 2: Local vs online

The ‘look and feel’ of my localhost XAMPP is not 100% the same with the Apache server of my host. So I have to now and then test it online.
Just recently I’ve found this lill’ usefull plugin: Theme Test Drive. Activating this plugin it will give you, logged in as a admin, the ability to activate another theme and see what the site actually will look like.
In the mean time the regular visitors will see the clever ‘under construction’ theme Launchpad.

Issue 3: Intense Debate is still giving me headaches

I just might have to dish it in the end after all. I’ve complained here why I chose for Intense Debate. The problem is that when ID is enabled it takes too long to count the number of comments: it has to retrieve data from the ID-server for every post.

Gotta go…and make some more fan-tas-tic progress.

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So just recently I’ve installed the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog. As you may notice however, the older posts with no comments are still using the built in commenting system. The reason for this is that somehow I’ve not been able to synchronize my WP account with my ID account.
The new plugin crashed and I was forced to use the older version of the plugin. Also with this version however I’m still not able to import my older comments. In general, you should not have any trouble, so don’t be alarmed.

So why did I bother then? Well I’ve got three reasons for that:

1. I want for all my Wordpress powered projects one common commenting system. Although not many of my visitors may register, some of them will be automatically registered when they’ve got an Intense Debate account already. This should encourage them to participate more interactively.

2. I’m expecting Automatticto fully integrate Intense Debate into Wordpress in the near future. It is a logical next step and I would not be surprised if they do this well before version 2.8. The acquisition by Automattic is also the reason that for example Disqus is no more an option for me.

3. It saves me a lot of development and design time when I decide to use a free WP template, which does not support gravatars and threaded comment. The Unstandard theme is a good example of this. Although you can’t design it fully to your own taste, it still is flexible enough.

So if you should also run into troubles with the newest version of Intense Debate and the support team is not able to help you out, like in my case, you should consider using the old plugin/version. And take the lack of some features for granted, I’m afraid.

UPDATE

Ironically on 23th January 2009 the Intense Debate site is down. And another con for using a third party commenting system is beeing illustrated very typical with this: it slows down my site significantly and when a post has been loaded, you can not comment!
I’ll give them yet another chance…for now.

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As stated in my post Setting goals for 2009 I’ll try to post only about the projects I’m working on…from now on. And I have to admit it’s hard not to blog, rant or rave about anything else.
Because there is actually a lot to blog, rant and rave about. For example this blog now has reached a Pagerank of 2 in 3 months, but so did my sleeping site Uppedd.com, which never had any content at all…and this is a big mystery to me.

The first post of 2009 year is a ‘fan-tas-tic’ one. Well, actually it’s about one of my projects called ‘Fan-tas-tic’ and a although the name may suggest otherwise it’s actually a quite humble project: a ‘fan-tas-tic gallery’ powered by Wordpress.

Yes, I am aware that there are already hundreds of (CSS) galleries (like these lists of examples: 36 + 74 + 115) and a lot of free Wordpress themes to make your own. However they all lack some essential features for the visitors and for the administrator.
I’ll come back to these features in another post, when I’ve got the full feature list of my own gallery complete.

In the mean time you should also check out some of the galleries above for inspiration and figure out which features you think they lack and leave a comment. If I can, I might just implement it in my ‘Fan-tas-tic Gallery’ theme.

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