Searching, for real
When I launched Search a week or so ago, there were a couple of problems with it. Those have been corrected, along with a number of other bugs, most of which only pertained to me when I'm logged in. Regardless, I wanted to mention that it's fixed now, in case you tried it earlier and didn't get any results.
Digg widget
I finally got around to figuring out how to correct the way the Digg widget on the Profile page displays in IE7, and made some improvements for other browsers as well. Sarah reminded me it was broken, with massive text that overlapped content. I got the DOM snapshot working in Opera 9.5, since their new developer console doesn't show that, and then I was able to comb through the html to find what I could add style to.
So it's looking a bit better, and I even managed to get the digg count to disappear, since that wasn't supposed to be displayed in the first place. It still has the stupid fixed height, leaving a bit of a gap under the text, but I can't make it smaller since a story with a long title will wrap. Oh well, it's definitely an improvement.
Searching
I've gotten a new build of Spark --XeoMage's backend software-- online, bringing with it Search. This long-overdue feature means that if you want to track down a picture from sometime in the summer between 2000 and 2003, or a movie review that was who-knows-when, you can just type in a keyword and get right to it.
There's a number of other things in the new version, but that's the only one I really have implemented. I've got some plans to spend a bit of time enhancing XeoMage style and layout. The templates that make up the site have gotten pretty cluttered and I have a few adjustments that I want to make since the site doesn't render well in certain situations.
Images
After roughly six months I have completed adding image support to Spark, and hence XeoMage. Today I ported all of the pictures in the Photos section into the new image management system. That included generating larger thumbnails (ooh, 70%!), fortunately not a manual process, followed by some cropping of existing photos to standardize all of my image sizes, unfortunately a manual process. However, I'm thrilled to say that after a rather long hiatus I can start adding new photos!
Regular readers may recall that I lost about a half terabyte of data to a raid array configuration problem, and as a result there will be a gap between what's on the site and the new stuff I add. However, I will try to make up for that with quantity. Adding photos was always a pain, involving a tedius process in PhotoShop, file naming, ftp uploading, and then posting to the site. That is now all handled by Spark in one fell swoop.
Pending Enhancements
Work has been ongoing on Spark, the backend to XeoMage. Most of my focus recently has been on the image system, which will let me upload and crop photos directly through the browser. Unfortunately because I've been working on this and I'll have to go back and import all of my existing photos when it's ready, I've been reluctant to add any new Photos to the site until it's done.
The reason for this post is let you know that I'm finally close to finishing, and that my hope is to bring the new version live in the next week or so. Once that's done I hope to add a whole bunch of new photos, and possibly a new project as well.
New Web Hosting
It shouldn't make much difference to those that visit the site, but I have just changed over to a new web host. The new host is a larger company, so hopefully it will be a bit faster. More importantly it gives me the tools and control I need to continue developing Spark (the software that runs XeoMage). So look forward to some new features in the future, and at least a couple of minor bugs getting fixed in the next few weeks.
Fixes
There have been some broken things here and there recently, due in no small part to my ongoing work improving the backend code. While I try to work on dev code and leave the site working on known good, some changes require the database to be altered. When that happens I often find unintended consequences to a change I made, which I then bug fix on the live site. Then I think everything is working only to find later something else is broken.
However, I want to let you know that for the time being I believe that I have corrected these issues and that everything is working correctly. I also don't have any short-term plans for database changes, and if I do I will try to test them on a dev copy. Unfortunately, most of the improvements are for Spark itself, and other sites using it, moreso than XeoMage.
I have some new site content that I've been meaning to get to for a while but haven't. I will try to get better about that, but some of it is a lot of work to launch and with my current focus on Spark it's difficult to find the time. Hopefully soon.
Dugg
I added a new feature to the Profile section to display stories that I recently "dugg" on Digg. For some reason it is also showing the number of other people that dugg the story, even though I specified not to display that, so hopefully that piece will disappear at some point. I'm thinking about some other things I can add into the profile page, but I'm not sure what that format will look like, or if I'll even keep this. In any case, it's something new.
Quotables
Before the redesign, I had a random quote on the home page and then a Quotes section that listed all of them. Quotes as a section seemed sort of excessive, given it was fairly small and didn't get changed much. So with the redesign, I removed the Quotes section but left the random one on the home page. Since then I've found that sometimes I wanted to find a specific quote. I was able to browse for it in the database via the administration system, but I figured it would be fairly simple to make it a bit more available.
A couple of stylesheet and template additions later, the full list of quotes is available by clicking on the random one on the home page. I also trimmed and modified the list slightly. New ones won't register on the RSS or the last updated date on the site, since I don't really consider them that important, but if you want you now have a way to get to all of them.
Projects Section Launched
I've finally launched the first new section since the redesign: Projects. I've only managed to add one project so far, namely the Cathedral project, which was a photography trip Eriq and I took to Gary, Indiana where we did some urban exploration of the City Methodist Church, which has been abandoned for over twenty years.
I have some other new projects to add, but give me some time. Adding this section revealed a number of things I needed to work on, particularly around the style sheet. I've got it working mostly the way I want it to, but there will definitely be some tweaks to come. I may change a couple of layouts, but we'll see. I also made some further improvements to the administration side that helped me develop and launch the new section. That, too, has a long way to go.
The projects entries show up individually on the rss feed, but that's kind of useful because some projects will grow after they are initially posted. So if you got a bunch of updates, I apologize. I also apologize for any problems anyone ran into with the site the past few days. There were some unanticipated challenges that I had to fix and I know there were some minor glitches. I hope you like the new section, and keep checking back for new stuff!
(Update: I also modified the RSS feed so that the Project posts link to the project itself and not the root of the section)