Notails Blog

Messed about with the design a bit.  Still not happy with it though.  I wish I was a designer

I moved the photography section to the root so that visiting http://notails.com goes directly to the photography.   I got tired of the message thing breaking every time firefox updated its version, and I believe ‘portal’ style homepages are out of vogue.

I also made some improvements to the photography section.  Specifically …

• The zooming works better on the single image view page
• I altered the click behaviour of the random image part of the homepage, so that clicking on the image opens it (instead of getting another random image) and clicking the title gets another random image.
• Added the name of the gallery the image belongs to to the link that takes you to that gallery.
• Added a ‘recently added’ part.  It grabs the images that share the newest upload date.  (Haven’t quite worked out how to handle uploads that span midnight.  If I upload say 10 images, and five of them make it to the website at 23:59 and the next five make it at 00:00 then only the next five will be shown on the ‘recently added’ part, which isn’t the behaviour I want)

Things I have thought about doing…

• Incorporate the comments into the gallery view page, so that there is a graphic which you hover over, which then queries the database using ajax and pulls back that image’s comments, and includes a button to add a comment.
• Completely overhaul the visual design.  It is currently an “it’ll do for now” design.

…There you go.

http://notails.com/photography/test.php

I am working on an improved photography section.   It uses jquery/ajax to load the bigger thumbnails, so you get the smaller thumbnail grid sooner and the illusion of a quicker page load (half the page does load quicker but the full page probably takes about the same time as it’s the same content)

It uses PDO for database access so it’s supposed to be more secure.  I have also tried to streamline the code so that it’s easier to read should I have to look at it or edit it in future.

Thinks still to do…

• Add the comments functionality (display and add comments using jquery/ajax)
• Change/improve the visual design.

It’s quite secure,  except that if someone wants to swear or be rude the code can’t detect that.  I would have to remove such messages manually.

I’ve moved my website to hostgator from hostmonster.

I will move the old blog posts soon.  (Assuming I can do so with an sql insert)

Edit:  As you can see I was able to insert the old blog entries (and comments).  Just needed to alter the ids of the new ones so that the old ones didn’t clash.