JungleDragon Alpha rev4 deployed! »
FERDY CHRISTANT - AUG 27, 2010 (02:41:15 PM)
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!
