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1. 

   Ardentfrost
   Cooler than Tim

   The rayd redesign is pretty much finished. If anyone has any further suggestions for it or comments, please list them out. Here's the link:

   http://www.rayd.org/nautica.php

   Here are a few features:

   • Twitter Interface
     • View the latest 20 rayd tweets
     • Links and @names show up as clickable links
     • Use your mousewheel for quick scrolling
     • Submit new tweets from a javascript popup (Since no passwords are being stored, you have to put in your username and password each time)
     • Automatic updates every 60 seconds
   • Picasa Photo Carousel
     • Displays links to each user's 3 most recent updated albums
     • Hover album photo to see information
     • Carousel advancement stalls on hover and cancels on manual advancement
     • Information cached on rayd for two hours
   • Recent Activity Cycler
     • No change in information from current rayd design
     • Cycle occurs every 6 seconds
     • Hovering a user's name displays that site's information
     • Hovering the container pauses the cycle
   • No change in forum layout or information
   • Awesome masthead!
   • I think this is rayd's first non-blue theme

   A few final touch-ups include getting ajax updaters on the forums, latest blog post section, and indvidual blog sections.

   One big question that remains is if the photo carousel is displaying the "correct" information. Should it display each person's latest few album updates (as it does)? Or should it display the latest X updates no matter who they were made by?

   I can see the benefits and drawbacks of each... On one hand, who cares to see my third oldest album which was updated well over a year ago? On the other hand, it's not really fair for the front page's photo aggregator be dominated by a couple people who post a shit ton of albums.

   I'd also like to know if there's any demand for flickr support. I know most of us use Picasa, but if people also use flickr, I could probably get feeds from there too. Just let me know.

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   darkphetus
   I put sensual in nonconsensual

   Two things:

   1. No link to individual blogs. If I wanted to get to Chris's site, as an example, I'd have to click a post of his. Can there be a link to the personal sites on the mainpage (the recent activity area).

   2. Picasa area. Josh and I had the disagreement that the Picasa area would be dominated by me (understandable), but I will be modifying my album-posting habits if we do wind up changing how it works now.

   When I brought up the idea of a album-browser to Melissa, I had hoped that it would function similar to the "latest blog posts" area, where instead of blog posts it would be "latest rayd member photo albums" so that you could quickly glance at the area and see if someone posted a new album. As it stands now, you would have to remember what the rotation looked like to see if anyone posted anything new. In keeping with the idea that the rayd.org mainpage be an aggregator of our personal site's information (posts, pictures, forums, etc) I didn't see the merits in keeping just that section of the mainpage operating under a different ruleset than the rest of the page. If someone wanted to browse the rayd members pictures, that's what the PICTURES link at the top should be for (and hopefully that can be updated quickly).

   So the TLDR version is that the photo area should function like the latest blog posts area, an easy way to see at a glance if new albums have been posted by any rayd members. At least that's how I saw it working. And I will be more judicious in my album posting habits (I posted 6 new albums at once because I was behind in posting them. SORRY!)

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   darkphetus
   I put sensual in nonconsensual

   oh, and kudos on the redesign. It's very slick, and everyone i've shown it to has liked it.

   Posted 1 year ago #
4. 

   eXcalibur
   Member

   I really like it! Nice and compact. I do like the Picasa rolling area and I agree with Tim in that I don't know which album is new. I like that it scrolls through everyone but is there a way to maybe make the thumbnails look different when the album has just been updated by the user? I don't know, something like any album newer than 2 weeks gets a different looking border or something.

   And I do think it would be good to have links to the actual blogs.

   Other than that, this is freakin cool. I super like the graphic with Tim on the chair!

   Posted 1 year ago #
5. 

   Ardentfrost
   Cooler than Tim

   Was that Tim that surfed the chair? I couldn't remember if it was him or Stephen that did that.

   Posted 1 year ago #
6. 

   Ardentfrost
   Cooler than Tim

   Ok, links are fixed. It was something I wanted to do but forgot about.

   Also, let me point out, Mel is the one that led this project. In the past it was me, but this time she just got me to do some programming for her. So don't thank me for how good it looks. Personally, I'm especially impressed with what she did with the masthead, how she made the latest blog posts section more readable, the look of the forums box, and particularly the interface to submit tweets. It looks very slick.

   I'll work on redoing the picture stuff. I still think it's just going to be a long list of pictures of Tim's kid... until someone else has a kid, then it'll be a long list of their kid and so on.

   Posted 1 year ago #
7. 

   Ciara
   Goddess

   Dangit, my husband didn't tell me he was going to post about this yet. I still have some things I want to tweak. So please ignore any color/style weirdnesses--am still working on them.

   Also just wanted to point out that the original code for the latest blog and forum posts is still intact--I didn't change any of the PHP code, just inserted div tags to fit the content to the template. Just wanted to throw that out there.

   Things left to do:

   - After the main site gets squared away, fix up the styles in the forums so you can seamlessly move from main page to forums.
   - Fix up the films and pics pages. I started on the films page, but I think Josh is going to make some sort of fancy schmancy code for this.

   Posted 1 year ago #
8. 

   Ardentfrost
   Cooler than Tim

   Ok, carousel is now changed. It shows the 20 most recently updated albums from the following list of picasa users:

   array("ardentfrost","Timothy.G.Hansen","chriswbarr","a.rock.lobster","joe.goble","annapw")

   If any of your albums are not being represented (or if you don't want an album represented), please let me know. The carousel ONLY shows your public albums, so you can just make all your drunken nude photos private and they won't be on there. Additionally, I know the Riggans aren't on there, but they have their own installation of gallery they use. Taylor said he's going to move some stuff over to picasa.

   I also made it easier to determine which album's information was being represented below the carousel with some opacity changes. Now the only picture with full opacity is the one whose info is being displayed.

   Yesterday I also put the "Latest Blog Posts" and "Latest Forum Posts" sections on AJAX updaters triggered every 5 minutes. That is similar to a page refresh without all the load to the server and your browser.

   I think the last thing to do on the main page (correct me if I'm wrong, Mel) is to figure out if we're using the Recent Activity section well. Mel and I both think more/better information could be represented there, but we're unsure what.

   I'm thinking maybe just a link to the most recent post and maybe the most recent comment made on the blog site-wide (eg., if someone commented on a post you made 4 weeks ago, it would be shown there). Or maybe the 4 most recent posts with comment counts, the links to the four most recent comments sitewide, the most recent of which has the actual comment.

   If anyone has ideas, let us know.

   Posted 1 year ago #
9. 

   darkphetus
   I put sensual in nonconsensual

   Can you set the albums to show 3 instead of 5 per rotation?

   Posted 1 year ago #
10. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    no

    Posted 1 year ago #
11. 

    darkphetus
    I put sensual in nonconsensual

    it would look better. honest.

    don't be stubborn.

    Posted 1 year ago #
12. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    Alright, back to 3 per page. Dropped the viewable albums to 15 to give us 5 pages in the carousel.

    Posted 1 year ago #
13. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    Plesk or some other administration tool we have used is pissing me off. If anyone knows how to change the open_basedir sitewide, let me know. It's not being populated in any .ini file I have found so I have no idea where it's being set.

    Posted 1 year ago #
14. 

    codered
    Hax0r at L4rge

    To answer Josh's question (I already spoke to him via IM, but just so everyone else knows) each site has it's own local settings for Apache and PHP via a file located at:

    /var/www/vhosts/<domain name>/conf/httpd.include

    Posted 1 year ago #
15. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    And now that I know how to adjust that stuff...

    For more tidy server load (and to prepare for php caching), I have created a centralized location for shared code and added that location to our base php.ini. This means every site that uses any of the rayd code or any other code we put there can access it by typing include_once("[framework_name]/[path_to_filename]");

    If anyone wants centralized access to Zend Framework or our rayd framework for their personal sites, just let me know and I'll remove your basedir bit. Additionally, if anyone wants access to another php framework in the shared space (like symfony or whatever), just let me know.

    Posted 1 year ago #
16. 

    Lewnatick
    Coder

    So when's the go-live date?

    Posted 1 year ago #
17. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    Mel wants to do more with the Recent Activity section, but has been busy this week since the QTS power outage. Once that gets finished, we'll roll it out and start working on subsequent pages (forums, pictures, etc...)

    Posted 1 year ago #
18. 

    Ciara
    Goddess

    Yeah, work is totally getting in the way of my slacking time.

    Posted 1 year ago #
19. 

    Ciara
    Goddess

    Eh, to hell with it. If no one minds that dynamic content box looking crappy for a couple of days until I get to it, might as well go live with it.

    Posted 1 year ago #
20. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    Ok, done. If anyone wants any of that old code, it's all in a subdirectory called TRASH (along with a bunch of other crap).

    Posted 1 year ago #
21. 

    darkphetus
    I put sensual in nonconsensual

    i think the recent activity area would look tons better with some small font styling changes. right?

    Posted 1 year ago #
22. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    Eh, to hell with it. If no one minds that dynamic content box looking crappy for a couple of days until I get to it, might as well go live with it.

    Pretty sure something like "font size" isn't going to help since she hasn't had time to do anything with the styling.

    Just let her work when she gets the chance. She made everything else look nice.

    Posted 1 year ago #
23. 

    codered
    Hax0r at L4rge

    Just a thought with the recent activity section:

    Make the title of each blog entry have a maximum length so that the text does not wrap around. Maybe make it a maximum of 20 characters and then tag on an ellipses at the end. I just looks really goofy when the title gets wrapped to a second line.

    And Tim is right, it would probably look a little better if maybe the title were a different font, or had some styling to make it pop out over top of the the last commenter fields.

    And lastly, it might be nice to have some spacing in between each entry.

    There's my two cents.

    Posted 1 year ago #
24. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    We had talked about preventing it wrapping to two lines. We agree.

    As for the styling, just wait til Mel gets a chance to do anything with it. It's just default right now.

    Posted 1 year ago #
25. 

    darkphetus
    I put sensual in nonconsensual

    Pretty sure something like "font size" isn't going to help since she hasn't had time to do anything with the styling.

    Pretty sure something like "font size" isn't going to help

    something like "font size"

    "font size"

    l2r

    Posted 1 year ago #
26. 

    Ardentfrost
    Cooler than Tim

    I added a little thing to make a short URL and append it into the tweet text from the rayd twitter interface. Just paste the URL into the designated text field and press enter. A 19 character bitly URL will be added to the end of the tweet text area.

    Posted 1 year ago #

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