See you all in 2009!

A response to this, I wonder who started this trend? I however have followed, it reminds me of the days when I had nothing but a computer that ran DOS 3.1 and most apps booted up with similar ascii pictures.

]]> http://photogabble.co.uk/design/all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it.html/feed 0 http://photogabble.co.uk/tumblrs/image-board-fixed.html http://photogabble.co.uk/tumblrs/image-board-fixed.html#comments Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:07:53 +0000 simon http://photogabble.co.uk/2008/03/11/image-board-fixed/ It took me five minutes to fix something that had been broken for almost a year, I had been baffled why it had broken in the first place before I read about php’s updates. Silly developers moving date functions about… Still photogabble.co.ukprojects/images/ now works.

This is a screen shot of a project I worked on a while ago, anonymous image uploading with the latest 100 being viewable on the front page. This was before I discovered the chan boards which are a little similar except instead of tagging images you annotate them. I wonder if I should revive this just for old times sake?

Well it has been a good year since I last properly updated this website, I think both my self and Sora have done well out of the current theme but the thing is, it’s old news and I feel the winds of change moving in and sweeping away the cobwebs which clutter this design. I have spent the past week (amongst doing uni work and socializing) working on a new design. You can see the work in progress above. I don’t feel like moving away from the three columb design just yet and so that is to stay, but there will be more under the fold to look forward to and I haven’t finished developing the sidebars. I hope that once it’s finished it will provide a refreshed image for photogabble At least thats the hope.

This is also why I haven’t been updating as much… too much work to do my friends. Too much work

(To skip the long story and get to the point go to the bottom)

FOG Games which stood for Free Online Games was the very first website I managed that became a sucess (you could say photogabble is my seccond). It was quite obviousley a free games website and back in 2000 and earlier there were very few websites that hosted a load of javascript, DHTML and java games so as soon as mine was found out it became an instant hit. I used to bounce around the net on various different free hosts and I never cleaned up after myself so there became various versions of the site fossilised there for all time and forgotten by me. To keep my visitors linked to the latest version on the latest host I had one or two fixed domain names which were of course obtained from free sources such as da.ru amongst others, supprisingly I never actually paid for anything to do with my website! I learnt to code html and css in 1999 and went through several websites before settling on foggames, as soon as I noticed I was achieving 1000 visitors a week with over 50 page views per visitor I knew I had a good thing going. Just thinking about it I must have only just started seccondry school

FOG Games evolved into FO Games (to remove the typo in the original name) in 2001 but I have yet to find any existing versions of that site… This is truely an amazing find for me, because I can see that even then 7 fucking years ago I was pretty damn good at what I was doing! From then on FOGames was achieving in its hay-day almost 4000 visitors a week but then either during the summer of 2002 or 2003 the traffic took a nose dive as other websites popped up with custom flash games combined with kids being off school. Due to most of the traffic originating from schools because my website was one of the few that wasn’t actually blocked my website became a dried up desert and because I couldn’t really understand where all the visitors had gone I gave up on FOGames. To put this in perspective as to what I have now, photogabble regularly gets on average between 150 and 200 visits a day (by 3000 visitors a month) so you can see how much better FOGames was doing in contrast. Being influenced into anime and furry art styles by kina-ink I bought anime-planet.co.uk a domain I let go a few months ago, and which I wish I hadn’t because one of those spam mongerers has nabbed it FOGames was quietly shut down and all traffic forwarded to anime-planet and my new hosting I paid for with my first job. After then my dad bought me the photogabble domain a year before I got into Coventry university and I ran a very, very old apple power pc (built in 1982 dual 20Mhz w00) as a server which the first version of photogabble ran on, wordpress and pretty much anything else would run shit show on it so I developed my own blogging software that ran incredibly fast on the server – which was doing well for its age running apache and mysql services on 20Mhz!

(End long story, begin point to post)

Well I have found an example of FOG Games, one of my earlier websites, it would be amazing if I could find my very first hand coded html website but I guess that shall just remain a dream. It’s hosted by fortunecity a horrible host at the time (and a worse one now) but fortunatly they don’t delete old accounts so most my stuff is there abeit horribly scarred by google adverts and other shit fortunecities decided to shove on it

You can see the website here, and it’s actually taken me a lot longer than normal to write this post because I have been playing the games on there! It’s still got its charm lol. I am now in the process of ripping my website off their servers and stripping out all the extra crap fortunecities added it shall be then hosted for prosperity here on photogabble for all to see

Stay tuned!

Testing 1, 2…

If you check out my test post you can see examples of what new and exciting things are to be coming to photogabble in the near future. I have been playing about with the idea of podcasting and videocasting, with the latter being the most likely candidate for sucess. Once upon a time I did contemplate podcasting – to the point that I got my first one cut and edited together just never released as at the time they were a relatively new thing and I didn’t have a clue how to streem them from my website. Well now I do, the same person who wrote the flash movie player has written a mp3 player – and so I shall be using that in the near future, if not for podcasts, for spreading the word about local bands.

Headings

As you can see I have also been playing about with formatting the text in my posts to make it easier to read the articles I write. The best way to do this is to title sections of an article with headers. With wordpress there is no easy way to include those on the WYSIWYG editor, however with Windows live writer its very easy. I have also used some simple css to format the headings so they split the page.

Images

Sora has uploaded some more header images, I think they are wonderfull. It’s one of my favourite features of photogabble having a flash fader with lots of beautifull photos.

Also from now on the website design wont drastically change, instead it shall evolve as it has done so far. Things will change but gradually instead of fresh design all the time.

I must say this theme is really good as a base for creating your own theme! There are so many more modifications I can make to it and the fact that all the template files are kept neat and tidy makes things so much easier to achieve.

I recently as of Saturday got back into Deviantart and thanks to a certain someone after discovering the joys of vector art, I am in love with it. I have finished one vector already and have been working away at three others (even though I think only one of them looks promising enough to show).

The best thing about discovering deviantart again is that it has now given me something to do other than myspace. It's also nice to note that certain people hadn't forgotten me and on my announcement of my comeback I had six comments

Well its cold, and I'm hungry so I'm off to get dressed and eat.

So what was wrong with the last theme I hear you ask. Well there was never anything really wrong with the last theme, just not a lot right about it either. It used flash which even though I tried my hardest, I couldn't rip out without breaking the theme totally. It was extremely hard to modify with a lot of CSS that didn't really need to exist, also it contained a lot of bugs which led me to try several different methods to get things looking how I wanted them to look, all of which failed. I went back to trying to edit the theme several times this week, but each attempt worked in one browser and broke in another, so I gave up.

Not to say that this theme is without its flaws, to get the Google adverts to show properly I had to edit the size of the main content box which broke the theme, not in a major way all that I had to do was make the third box 20px smaller and it all popped into place. If you think about it, that shows a pretty well designed flexible CSS. Other things I had to edit were the borders around smiles. I have yet to come across a theme that with out me modifying it has come with smiles that show properly. For those of you wondering how, include the code below into the bottom of your style.CSS and it will fix the problem for any theme.

img.wp-smiley{
border: 0pt none;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
vertical-align: middle;
}

So yes, I like this theme I have already added a lot of modifications to it, and shall continue to do so. The creator has made this theme very easy to modify as everything is laid out correctly and is easy to understand. So its goodbye Alexified and hello Qwilm!