Hear Ye! Since 1998.
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31
Jan 04
Sat

Site Refresh

It’s here. To be honest, the site doesn’t look all that different on the front-end. It’s a format that’s worked well for a while. It looks perhaps a little tighter, but it’s essentially the same. The back-end has been redesigned from the ground up, and I’ve put in some features I’ve been wanting to put in for a long time now.

Changelog

  • New domain name: update your links!
  • Search engine: No longer using Atomz, which was struggling with indexing a site with self-referential permalinks.
  • Photo gallery: also linked in a random photo block that you can see
    to the left, inspired by AJH.
    Uses the excellent Gallery
    1.4
    package. Don’t ask me why I called it Contemporaneously. I just think it’s a
    cool sounding word :). Not many photos in there currently.
  • Mobile posting module: I finally have a proper module (updated from the one I made four years ago!) for posting
    with non-computer devices. Unfortunately I couldn’t get procmail working on my
    server, so I’m using crontab to schedule mobile posts which means posts are
    delayed by up to a couple of minutes. The module accepts SMSes and e-mails
    with MIME attachments (including MMS/PXT messages) and allows for location and
    timezone stamping of posts. Security through obscurity is also bolstered by
    password protection (unfortunately sent in plaintext).
  • Thumbnail script: Tiny script which creates resampled thumbnails on the fly without making a duplicate of the file. Useful for mobile posts where images may not have the chance to be edited before posting.
  • Quicklinks: Inspired by
    Kottke’s remaindered
    links
    .
  • Generalised comments system: one module takes care of commenting
    for quicklinks, articles and any other section of the site requiring comments.
  • Follow-up posts: It’s been implemented. Could be a first.
  • New Mastheads: 1
    2
    3
  • Rehauled backend console, made myself some posting bookmarklets
  • Integrated Real into Hear Ye!

To Do

  • Conversion of features from Real over to new domain
  • The List is no longer on the left. I don’t know if I should bring it back – leave a note in the comments if you want it back.
  • A proper mailing page
  • Revise the guestbook which has turned into a spambook
  • Content for some of the pages
  • XML feed for quicklinks
  • Portal

That should do it for now.

This post has 13 comments

1.  Bonhomme de Neige

This is what hurts the most:

<td valign=”top” width=”500″>

Looks crap on my 1600×1200 res … please fix it! ;p

2.  Stu

1600×1200 is tiny, even on a 21 incher… The reason I fixed it at 500 is to cater for 800×600 minimum resolutions. If I make it liquid, the lines become too long to read comfortably at higher resolutions. Anyone else have an opinion?

3.  Dennis

The width works just fine for me. I’m running 1280×1024, but I keep my browser window much smaller just in case somebody does use a percentage-based width. Also, the page seems to load much more quickly now–must’ve made some changes to the html, eh?

4.  Fuzzy

Impressive list of features you’ve got there Stu. I seriously need to get sms posting hooked up on my site before I take off on my Perth to Sydney drive. Expect an email or two if I can’t get something cooked up on my own.

I’m getting the following error in the “instantaneously” photo box on the left:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /classes/AlbumItem.php on line 55

While I didn’t use “the list” regularly, I have used it to check out random sites while sitting around bored. Perhaps a move back to the old school “seperate links page” format might be best? If only to keep the neast load speeds.

5.  Sleeper

Keep the lines short, makes for good typography sense. Liking the short list a lot.

6.  Stu

Thanks for the feedback all!

Fuzzy has nicely picked up a bug with the gallery to do with sub-albums. Each album has a nominated picture that is turned into a thumbnail to represent the whole album. Sometimes the random block attempts to show one of those thumbnails. Those thumbnails don’t come with gallery information (a caption, location info, etc) so it spits out the error. Trying to make it so that the random image picker skips the thumbnails was proving to be too big a headache, so I just did a cheap workaround where I make the randomiser keep selecting a random photo until it didn’t pick up a thumbnail.

Hey Fuzzy, how long will you be in Sydney for?

7.  WaD

Was a fan of the list, used it in boredom situations also (and found some good stuff!).

Nice redesign (and nice update whilst I was still surfing through your site :p)

8.  Teldak

I’m on a 1028×768 IE6 Text Size Medium and the width is sort of frustrating. There’s now way you could work up some javascript to autodetect the resolution of the screen and load a proper stylesheet, or allow user-selectable stylesheets?

And is there a particular reason you increased the rowspacing on the text? It’s sort of odd to me for some reason.

9.  Napalm

fixed width pages are the only way to go! nice work stu.

10.  Teldak

Stu, is there any way you can make the “Suppress Email” option a remembered bit? Would be rather nice.

11.  Stu

Teldak: ok that should now be happening.

12.  Fuzzy

I’ll only be in Sydney for the weekend of the 20th.

13.  Fuzzy

I just stumbled onto the “followed on from” feature. That truely kicks arse.

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