This is to announce that JungleDragon Alpha revision 4 is now deployed on the staging environment. If you are a JungleDragon test user, please read the below carefully as it may require some small action on your behalf, for example clearing your cookies or refreshing your cache.

This release contains a few small usability improvements, but is mostly a technical improvement. Below are the changes:

Better thumb hovers

In the previous release, I improved the homepage by showing more images and less image metadata. The solution is to visualize metadata only when hovering a thumbnail. This has been improved further, below is an image without and with hover:

I plan to deploy this way of visualizing thumbs to the other image lists as well in a later release.

Image voting made more clear

In previous releases, the vote up button on the image page was not clear enough, as it only showed a small green vote block with an up icon. This call-to-action is now more emphasized by including the "Vote" text:

Pagination usability improvement

JungleDragon uses pagination for large lists, this works as on other sites, using page numbers that you can click through. The change that I now made only shows a big "More" link on the first page, since you pretty much always want to go to the next page from there. On all subsequent pages, normal number-based pagination is used.

Page rename

I was trying to be cute by calling JungleDragon terms and conditions the "Law of the Jungle". It is now simply called "Terms and conditions" to avoid confusion.

Hierarchical tag browsing

JungleDragon supports a unique and innovative feature: hierarchical tags. It combines the best of free format tagging and a strict taxonomy of categories. However, the way this is visualized to users needs a lot of improvement, therefore I have temporary disabled the visual part. This part will be redesigned in a later release and then re-enabled.

404 fixed for comment voting

If you were not signed in and tried to vote up a comment, after signing in it would throw a 404. Fixed.

Configurable statistics tracking

I can now configure the Google tracking code for statistics per JungleDragon environment.

Session management drastically improved

JungleDragon uses the CodeIgniter Session setup to manage sessions. It works as follow: You get a client-side cookie that stores a unique session id, your IP and your user-agent. The cookie is encrypted and recycled every x seconds to avoid session theft. The actual session data is stored in a database table.

I had a lot of problems with duplicate entries in the session table. These problems are now fixed, if you are interested in the technical details, go here.

Important: As a result of this change, I had to clear all sessions in the database. If you had a persistent session, it is now lost. Please clear your cookies (or only the one for JungleDragon) and sign in again.

Avatar upload feature dropped!

Before, I gave you the option to use an avatar from gravatar.com or to upload an avatar image to JungleDragon. My avatar upload feature was of course not as good as the gravatar service and it does not make sense to spend a lot of development time on it. Therefore, I decided to drop the avatar upload feature. Your avatar will be picked up from Gravatar.com if you have an avatar configured there for the email address you use for JungleDragon. If you do not have it configured, you get the default avatar. If you uploaded an avatar to JungleDragon, sorry, but it is gone. Use the gravatar service instead.

Javascript improvements

Another technical improvement. I consolidated a lot of javascript libraries so that I make less HTTP requests now. They are loaded at the bottom now to further speed things up. Please clear your cache (shift+refresh) to get the latest javascript!

Concluding

The last 4 revisions have gradually improved JungleDragon based on test and concept feedback. Next week I will discuss how I plan to go from here. Stay tuned!

The JungleDragon pilot is going quite well. Although the quantity of testers is modest (currently 15, always looking for more), I have received a lot of feedback, over 70 items in total. About 60-70% of it is solved already. There are some items left that cost a lot of time to implement, so you will find those in future releases.

Despite being very happy with this amount of feedback, I am always looking for more. By sheer accident I came across a service called ConceptFeedback. The basic idea of this service is simple: people post website concepts and other users review it. These other users are typically designers and usability experts so they have quite a good eye for reviewing new concepts. The result is that you get high quality free feedback on your concept within a very short time frame. An invaluable service.

Before you can post your concept on this service, you need to earn 5 credits. You can easily do this by reviewing 5 concepts posted by others. You first need to give something to the community before you get some. Once your credits are unlocked, get ready for some expert feedback. Your concept will get plenty attention within the community because only a few per day are submitted.

Here is my posting of JungleDragon on ConceptFeedback.

It is a humbling experience to expose your concept to strangers who will critique it without reservations, but also very educational. And once in a while, a review comment can make my day:

"Let me say at first that you have created a cute site which is beautiful from graphical design perspective with perfectly working sweet gizmos giving instant gratification. Wow, really amazing level of craftsmanship."

In all other cases, I add things to my rapidly expanding todo list :)

JungleDragon Alpha revision 3 is deployed as of now at http://staging.jungledragon.com

Where revision 1 and 2 fixed and improved dozens of things reported by testers, this release does one thing only: it repurposes the homepage, the entry point of JungleDragon. Here is a somewhat outdated screenshot of the previous homepage (click to enlarge):

Many of you recognize this style of homepage from sites like Digg.com, and the many sites that follow this popular pattern. It shows a stream of content on which users can vote. The content is described using a title, a truncated description and other metadata such as the submitter of the post. Finally, there is the possibility to directly vote on an entry.

I've come to realize that such a design does not make sense for a photo site like JungleDragon:

• It takes up a lot of vertical space, which means scrolling. This does not match the common audience of JungleDragon who just want to view photos.
• The extra metadata of a photo takes up a lot of space, much more than the actual thumbnail itself. Although the metadata can be interesting, it should not dominate the layout so much. Not on the homepage.
• Allowing for direct voting based on thumbnails allows for fairly superficial voting. It may increase the quantity of votes, but not the quality. If a user is lured into a thumb, I imagine they click on it to see the full size. From there, they can vote on it if they want to.

In an act of simplicity, the redesigned homepage now looks like this (click to enlarge):

Much cleaner and simpler eh? A strong emphasis on the photos and much less scrolling. The top image is still large and then followed by a grid of images. The number of rows in the grid depend on your reputation. It starts with 5 rows and could grow to 11 rows based on your class in the food chain. Note thatthe screenshot still shows 3 rows.

The image metadata is not completely gone; upon hovering a thumbnail, a quick inline box shows basic information:

The new homepage: less nonsense, more photo viewing. Agree?

Watch it live at http://staging.jungledragon.com

JungleDragon Alpha revision 2 is now deployed to the staging environment: http://staging.jungledragon.com

This release brings the following changes and fixes:

• When using the "View Sizes" option to view images in their large or original format, part of the image will be cropped when the image is larger than your browser window. This is now fixed.
• JungleDragon now also records and display the FocalLength EXIF parameter if available in your images. This change only works for images you upload as of now
• You now get extra karma for uploading an image that includes EXIF data
• You now get extra karma for uploading high resolution images. For each 1000 pixels on the dominant axis (depending on image orientation) you get 5 extra karma points. There is a maximum to this extra reward so there is no need to upload insane resolutions.
• Fixed a bug in the karma log: It was limited to show only the 200 most recent entries. Now it shows all of them, albeit paginated like before.
• On the homepage, all thumbs are now in a fixed width box that makes the layout more consistent when portrait and landscape images are mixed in one overview
• Typo in FAQ fixed, some other pages updated.
• Firefox now also shows shadows around specific images (such as the main image on the homepage)
• Before, when you had only a very small karma progress bar in the header, it was too small to trigger the tooltip that displays you karma score. This is now fixed, you can hover the entire bar for this tooltip, no matter at what % of the level you are.
• Some images showed "Edited 40 years ago". This happens after editing the license of an image. This is now fixed. You may need to edit and save old images where this is still the case.
• Already fixed in Alpha rev 1 but now confirmed: There are images that do not have a tag yet do not appear in the "Untagged" overview. This too happens when the license of the image is edited. This was fixed in Alpha rev1 but you need to edit and save the old images to see the fix.
• Auto completion is now disabled for certain forms where this is insecure, for example the "Change email" form.
• I was using a hacky plugin to control the styling of the upload control but it has unwanted side effects. For example IE8 has a new security "feature" that shows "fakepath" in the upload control instead of the real path you selected. I decided to drop the styling hack. The upload control now uses the default rendering of your browser/OS combination. It is less consistent with the styling of the rest of the upload form but at least it is more robust.
• I have undone the change of Alpha rev1 where I stopped using tables for tag formatting on the "Tags" page. The tables are back. For the "picture" display mode of the Tags page I switched to 2 columns instead of 3. The image counters are slightly better too. In a next revision I will likely improve the Tags page even further.

Combined with the changes from Alpha revision 1, this solves the majority of the findings so far. Nevertheless, there are things left to do. On to developing Alpha revision 3!

Reminder

Remember, I always am looking for more testers, users and feedback. You can even win a 100$ prize! Here are a few important links:

• JungleDragon Alpha (test environment)
• FAQ (For those new to JungleDragon)
• About the test environment and test contest
• How to give test feedback

Whilst JungleDragon is not in production, there is a parking page at the production url (jungledragon.com). With the alpha released, this parking page needed to be updated. I decided to create a new, simple site from scratch:

Not much to see here, just a temp page. I will soon start on revision 2 of the alpha, there is still a lot of feedback to process. Nevertheless, keep it coming.

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